QTR-Quadtone RIP

Hi there,

After a week of ploughing through archives and documentation, it seems 
to me that the art of initial curve creation is one of the best kept 
secrets of QTR. The closest most tutorials get is "yes, it can be done, 
but we recommend you start with a reasonably close profile and tweak 
it". Paul repeatedly told us how his initial curves were hand-drawn, and 
I wonder if this is really the only and optimal method, and if it is, I 
haven't found detailed instructions on how to do this most efficiently.

What I am after right now, is to print the best possible B&W one can 
with the original Claria inks and a 1400. Paul's "B&W Printing with 
Epson 1400 and Claria Inks" seems to be the way I want to go. Printing a 
few 21 step wedges showed me that his profiles needed some tweaking to 
be used on my paper of preference (Harman Gloss Baryta), since there 
were several tone shifts throughout the wedge. Furthermore, I would like 
to create several profiles (to be combined in QTR) like neutral, cool, 
warm, and sepia, all based on BO with additional LM, LC and Yellow.

I thus am looking for a full understanding of QTR's inner life (e.g. 
I've seen the parameter GRAPH_CURVE take the value YES although the 
profile didn't contain any curve description...??), so as to be able to 
start from scratch. I would be highly grateful to anybody pointing me to 
the documentation answering the following questions and help me go further:

- Is there an alternative to drawing the points of an initial curve 
manually?

- Is there a way to automate the correction of LM/LC/Y-curves other than 
by visual/manual trial and error? (I have a Spyder3Print SR at hand.)

- Is there a way to "linearize" a and b values, the way we linearize L 
values by measuring?

Thank you for reading,

Louis