Plug-ins

One of the main improvements of lcms2 is the plug-in architecture. Plug-ins means you can use the normal API to access customized functionality. Licensing are another compelling reason, you can move all your IP into a proprietary plug-in and still be able to upgrade core revisions in open source. There are 10 types of plug-ins currently supported.

• Memory management
• Error management
• Interpolation
• Tone curve types
• Formatters
• Tag types
• Tags
• Rendering intents
• Multi processing elements
• Optimizations

I will discuss each type in incoming posts. Plug-ins are declared to lcms by a single function

cmsBool cmsPlugin(void* Plugin);

And the "Plugin" parameter may represent one or several plug-ins, as defined by the plug-in developer. To write plug-ins, there is an additional include file lcms2_plugin.h, which declares functions which are not in the public API but may be useful to this task. For example I/O access, matrix manipulation, and all the types needed to populate the plug-in structures. Those functions begins with "_cms" to denote those are extended functionality and should not be called the application by rather by the plug-in.