Did something change between these versions? We are seeing PDFs with noticeably lighter colors in version 13.0.

The release notes mention "prince-pdf-page-colorspace" which was the only thing that stood out to me as a possible explanation; however, we are already setting:

@page {
  prince-pdf-page-colorspace: none;
}

When I inspect the actual PDF contents I see things like below which were not present in version 12.5 generated PDFs.

  /Resources <<
    /ColorSpace <<
      /DefaultCMYK [
        /ICCBased
        10 0 R
      ]
    >>

Edited 4 Feb 2020 by jaredculp

Are you specifying a PDF profile and/or output intent color space?

I do not believe so. Are there particular values we can use to achieve the same functionality we had with prince 12.5?

Can you provide the prince command you are using, and a test document if necessary? Also, which PDF viewer(s) are you using?

input: attached.

cat $input | /usr/local/bin/prince --input=xml --structured-log=buffered --xinclude --force-identity-encoding --css-dpi=72 -

I run it against prince 12.5 and prince 13 (pdfs also attached), the colors are lighter in prince 13.

PDFs are viewed with macOS Preview.

I've also included an extreme closeup of both pdfs side by side. The one on the bottom is prince 13 and appears just ever so slightly lighter.

For reference: prince12 has cmyk(71, 27, 2, 1) and prince13 has cmyk(65, 23, 1, 0) in the side by side comparison.

1. Screen Shot 2020-02-06 at 3.11.49 PM.png‎ 692.1 kB
2. ea8e9016-fa92-4275-ace1-418d2b877717.html‎ 198.9 kB
3. out-12.pdf‎ 20.5 kB
4. out-13.pdf‎ 404.7 kB

Edited 6 Feb 2020 by jaredculp

Thanks. In Prince 13 CMYK colors are being assigned a default ICC profile, making them device-independent instead of device-dependent colors, when not strictly necessary. We'll change it back in Prince 13.3.

Thanks for the reply. Is there a way for us to workaround this issue in the meantime?

If Prince 12.5 is working for you then it would be best to stick with it for a little longer.

We are reliant on the upgrade to prince 13 in order to get support for repeating linear gradients in SVG.

Perhaps we can expedite the release of Prince 13.3.

That would be great news Mike. Do you and your team have any more formal idea of what that might mean? We're currently evaluating our options to meet a client deliverable deadline so any more formal guidance around when such a feature would be generally available would be great.

Hopefully we can prepare a new build early next week.

Today we have released Prince 13.3 which includes a fix for this issue, please let us know if this helps!

The issue appears to be fixed and colors now match their Prince 12.5 counterparts. Thanks so much for the fix and quick turnaround!