I’ve run across a strange bug and I’ve had no luck finding an answer on photo.net or discussions.apple.com. The only reference to it I’ve found on the web was a post on ColorForums by Steve Upton.
So here it is:
I’m trying to change the internal name of an icc profile using the ColorSync utility in Mac OS X 10.4.11 to change the desc string. When I type in the new name and tab off the field, it changes to chinese characters. I created this output profile using an X-rite ColorMunki which I believe creates icc v4 files. For this profile ColorSync displays a header tag of ‘desc’, data of ‘mluc’, size of 36, with a description of “Multi-localized description strings”. After selecting ‘desc’ the editing pane shows three columns for “Language”, “Region” and “String” that originally held the values of “en”, “US”, and “Stylus Pro 3800_CM-HFAB.icc”. When I changed the string value it initially displayed the roman characters, but switched to chinese characters as soon as I tabbed off the field.
Comparing this profile to an icc I downloaded from Epson, I see that the header values are in a different order, and that the values are also different: tag = ‘desc’, data = ‘desc’, size = 109, and Description = “Localized description strings”. After selecting ‘desc’ the editing pane shows three fields: ASCII Name: SP3800_EFP_PK_2880, UniCode Name: , and Mac Script Name: SP3800_EFP_2880. I can change the name here and it changes properly.
I’ve tried working around the problem by turning off all chinese characters in the OS and Fonts, but to no avail.
v4 profiles, as you probably noticed, store the internal name in a different type of data structure. v2 profiles used the “desc” type and v4 use the “mluc” type.
BOTH use the “signature” of “desc” which can cause some confusion. The signature of the tag is what is contained - in this case the profile’s internal name. The type is how it is stored - the actual byte-per-byte ordering of the data and the data types of each internal chunk.
“mluc” supports more types of localized names. So those who are inclined can give a profile a different name in many different languages.
It sounds like the version of ColorSync Utility that you are using may not write “mluc” description tags properly. If you have access to OS X 10.5 you might want to try renaming it there.
Our ColorThink Pro (latest beta version) will handle this name type properly… at least in a limited sense. We did not go so far as to allow editing of names in each different language type. The code around unicode names gets quite fiddly so we didn’t go all the way with it.
The order of the tags isn’t relevant, they can be stored any which way and simply opening and resaving a profile in some tools might reorder them. This profile is obviously a V2 profile which contains a “desc” type “desc” tag that the ColorSync Utility handles OK… (clear as mud right!?)
hope this helps (and I’m rather surprised this hasn’t come up before)
Regards,
Steve
o Steve Upton CHROMiX www.chromix.com
o (hueman) 866.CHROMiX
Thanks for posting your results. We’ll make an note of that bug in the OS 10.4 version of ColorSync Utility. Chances are very good that Apple won’t be going back to fix that one.
