Choosing a colour profile for an unknown destination
Hello!
So right off the bat, I want to be clear that I understand this: the best way to choose a colour profile is ask your printer what they use. I understand why this matters. But this is not the situation I'm dealing with.
I'm designing a document for an unknown destination. It's an educational PDF that will made publicly available for download on the internet, and people will print it themselves. Either on home printers, or printers available in their workplaces/ public libraries. Accessibility is the biggest priority- we need to assume people aren't using nice coated paper, that they can't/wont pay to print it professionally, and that they have no control over printer settings.
So I need a decent CMYK profile that will work for ordinary, uncoated, white 8.5 X 11 US paper sheets. Something that might approximate the settings of a big lug copy-print-in-one printer in a library, and wont completely soak the paper with ink. (For reference, this is in Canada/US.)
Any suggestions?
Or in this case is it better to distribute the document in RGB? (And just be diligent about designing with colours that can be recreated in CMYK gamut?) Are consumer-level printers generally better at handling and managing RGB documents? ie. Is sending sRGB ICE61966-2.1 to a bunch of random destinations likely to cause fewer glaring colour problems than using a specific CMYK profile?
Any advice appreciated. Thank you!
