Experimenting on how to add CMYK and color management to Cairo

Cairo is an amazing piece of tech that powers a lot of stuff, like all of GTK. Unfortunately it is not without its problems. The biggest one being that it was designed almost 20 years ago with the main use case of dealing with "good old" 8 bit uncalibrated RGB images. There has been a lot of interest in adding native support for things like CMYK documents, linear RGB, color calibration, wide gamuts and all of that good stuff. Sadly it has not come to be.

The reasons are mostly the same as always. The project is sadly understaffed and there does not seem to be a corporate sponsor to really drive the development forward. What makes things extra difficult is that Cairo supports a lot of different platforms like Postscript, Win32, Quartz and SVG. So if someone wants to add new features in Cairo, not only do they need to understand how color math works and how to do C, they would also need to handle all the various backends. That is a rare combination of skills. In any case the patchset needed to make all that happen would be enormous and thus hard to get reviewed and merged.

As an exercise I thought I'd see if I could change the landscape somewhat to make it easier to experiment with the code base. Out of this came this project repo called Comac (for, obviously, COlor MAnaged Cairo). The creation process was fairly straightforward:

• Take the latest Cairo trunk
• Delete every backend except image and PDF
• Rename all files and symbols from cairo-something to comac-something
• Add minimal code for generating grayscale and CMYK PDFs
• Create a demo app that creates test PDFs

The output files are very simple, but the whole thing actually works. Both Okular and Acrobat Reader will happily display the documents without errors. Thus people who are interested in color work can now actually look into it without having to understand how Xlib works. Since Comac does not need to follow all of Cairo's backwards compatibility guarantees, experimenters can play a bit more fast & loose.

Want to contribute?

Merge requests welcome, I guess? I have not thought too deeply about governance and all that. If there is a lot of interest, this could be moved to its own top level project rather than living in my Github pages. Just note that the goal is not to fork things and create yet another graphics library. In the best possible case this project is only used to discover a good API and an idea on how it could best be implemented. These changes could then be put into Cairo core.