Is there a way for PrinceXML to support the PDF/X-4p standard, which allows the ICC profile to managed externally?

We tried the no-embed option for -prince-pdf-color-conversion and it does not seems to work when --pdf-profile is set to PDF/X-4.

We don't support this profile yet, I'm curious what is the use case exactly?

This is just one of the options we are looking into when working with our print vendor.

Our current workflow produces thousands of individual PDF files rendered by Prince, which then gets merged into a large file with out in-house custom tool.

We are looking to skip the merging step and send individual files directly to the print vendor.

Their tooling works better with PDF/X-4 compliant files. However, total files size increases significantly when each file needs to embed the full output intent icc profile.

Right, that makes sense. We will investigate this profile.