My wife discovered tonight that Mozilla (including Firefox) can't handle CMYK-format JPEGs. Apparently there aren't a whole lot of these (they are usually RGB), but apparently it is a valid part of the JPEG specification. I understand people who do prepress-style work deal with these.
I was under the impression that Mozilla used a lot of image libraries to handle the different graphics formats (like libpng, etc.). I would have thought that whatever library Mozilla used for JPEGs would specialize in whatever JPEGs need and handle it just fine. Instead the user gets a broken image icon, or if trying to view the image directly, a statement saying that the image cannot be viewed because it contains errors.
This bug was reported four years ago. :) If you have an interest in having it fixed, please vote for Mozilla bug #44781.
Mozilla only uses one image lib
mdxi on 2004-11-30T04:57:11
There's only one image rendering lib in Mozilla. It's custom written, high performance, and apparently doesn't support CYMK. I speak, of course, of
libpr0n (sfw (not a joke)).
Only Mozilla?
bart on 2004-11-30T07:43:20
No, MS Internet Explorer cannot, either.
With Microsoft's tendency to snoop files against your wishes, that's annoying. Your server reports this is a binary file, intended for download, yet MSIE (I'm talking about 5.x and before; 6.x is different) snoops on it, recognizes it as an image file, insists on trying to show it, fails, and shows a "broken image" icon. Fun.
How would you render it?
malte on 2004-11-30T10:38:24
There is no single way to correctly render CMYK images on screen. It all depends on the color of your ink. If you put shit in your black, that might still be exactly what you want to achieve
:)
