I noticed in the new printing protocol that switching between cartridges requires either emptying and refilling or changing the chips

True- it's not ideal to have to pull cartridges every print, but swapping the chips is fairly easy once you get the hang of it.

and also that, assuming one only has one cartridge set up for the Fe and Cu precursors, that there is no way to incorporate them into the pattern.

For the Fe and Cu, you will have to make two cartridges each, unless you plan on rewriting the .quad each time you print. I find it far simpler to just have an extra cartridge of each precursor on hand.

I went to look at the curve file to see if there was any customization possible, but I guess the file that was sent to us did not contain the editable .qidf version. Would it be possible for me to obtain a copy of this file? I would very much like to take a look at it.

The curve we use is actually not a .qidf file. Quadtone uses both qidf and quad files to interpret tifs, and only the quad files allow us to input enough information. Additionally, I believe qidfs are put through smoothing algorithms when they are created, which would definitely not be useful to us.

The ternary.quad file is what you want to look at. You can open it in any text editor and make changes, then save it as a quad file. For each color, the long string of numbers following the name is the amount of ink deposited (from 0 to 65535- we print pretty lightly) for each grayscale bit from white (255) to black (0).

I will put the excel file I use to create quads for the funkalicious tif on the download page.

A program that would create a quad- based on what cartridges we want to print where- would be ideal, and I think the best solution to the issues you are getting at. It would allow us to truly take advantage of all seven cartridge slots- potentially 35 combinations if Fe and Cu are used, or if you preprint the internal standards. I am not a programmer, so if anyone can create this, that would be fantastic. If you are interested, please get in touch with me directly.

Another way to solve this issue I suppose is to create additional .tiff files for each cartridge combination. Thanks for the new protocol and let me know if there are any additional updates adding more functionality.

The problem with creating different tifs is that a quad file can only describe 256 fields, and we would need far more to cover the possible combinations from 7 metals.