Re: Which one has the right color, Emacs or GIMP?

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Miles Bader writes:

 > > IMHO, Emacs should delegate this to either the display hardware and
 > > drivers
 > 
 > Sadly, they're usually all fucked up too though.

In which case, how is Emacs supposed to know what to do?  AFAIK there
is no such metadata for most formats (TIFF probably has it, Postscript
too I suppose, but surely not GIF or BMP), and if the hardware is not
reliable, how likely is it that it provides "I'm fucked up and this is
precisely how" metadata? :-)

 > _not_ just doing that -- it also reads image files using a variety of
 > libraries which may not have compatible interpretations for the values

And for which the metadata is missing....

 > they yield, and [pertinently to this thread] uses color numbers from the
 > user.

Which sounds like a perfectly good application for an (optional) Lisp
library that the user invokes at need.

 > Since the latter are presumably intended to be at least somewhat
 > platform independent, and different platforms can have wildly different
 > display systems, we then have to worry about the issue for those.

Well, no, you don't, since it was a pilot error in the first place.
And we're back to user assistance libraries.