Digital BW, The Print

[again, with linebreaks -- why doesn't yahoo's preview work??]

Here's a fairly basic question about digital B&W printing that
I hope someone can answer.

I've been printing for a few years with UT7 inks (thank you
MIS and Paul Roark!) on a 2200, and have mostly been
delighted with the results. But I'm finding a few things
annoying: (1) I've noticed that I get tonal compression in
shadows, presumably because the curves are flattening out,
that sometimes causes a loss of local contrast and makes
the print look flat; (2) I want to try some new papers, such as
Innova Fibaprint, but I can't find curves for them; and (3) I've
made soft proofing ICC profiles (using an GMB Eye-One),
which allows me to see the final tone on screen, and I've
used these to make some contrast curves to get a better
match between screen and print, but I had to fudge these by
hand and I'd like to do better.

So I'm wondering whether I should switch to the UT-3D (or
perhaps the 4K+, since at some point I hope to upgrade to a
printer like the 3800 with a wider carriage) and make ICC
profiles. I've skimmed Paul Roark's notes, and I've looked at
Roy Harrington's documentation for create-icc, but I'm
missing some basic understanding of the underlying
principles, so I can't make much sense of it.

In short, then, here are my questions:

1. How does a color-managed (ie, ICC profile based)
workflow for B&W with grayscale inks work? Unlike a color
workflow, we're trying to get different warm/cold tonings, so
the print shouldn't match what's on screen anyway.

2. Paul Roark's description seems to assume that you
combine his curves with profiling to generate the ICC
profile. Why do you need to do this, and how would you
generate the curve for a new paper?

3. Is there a simpler way to overcome my problems?

I'd be grateful for any pointers. Sorry if I've missed a
relevant posting.

Daniel
http://straightphotography.org