Pantone?

I've looked and looked and cannot find any pantone colors available to add to the color library. Am I looking in the wrong place? I've gone to Advanced>Color and looked everywhere there and cannot find anything.

I'm using the Mac version.

Help?

Tattoued,

As far as I understand there is no feature to add colors from a "color library" like InDesign, Illustrator, or most any other design layout program would. Pantone colors can only be added when you 1) export a document from either InDesign or Quark with those colors already defined in the layout program to begin with, or 2) add them from another FusionPro template that does contain the needed Pantone colors using the "Advanced>Import" feature to copy them over.

If you have certain clients that use specific colors over and over (color branding), then I would create a blank template that contains those colors and just keep importing them whenever you start a project from an existing PDF file. If you normally go from either InDesign or Quark, then have a layout template for each of those with those color already defined.

Hope this helps, and good luck.

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David's response is not correct. You can indeed add a Pantone color using the Acrobat plug-in. It's just a specific kind of spot color.

All you need to do is add a color with the desired Pantone name, and click the "Spot Color" button. As long as the output format and the RIP support spot colors, and the named spot color is available at printing time, it will be used in the output. You can manually define the CMYK equivalent of the spot color for on-screen display.

I apologize for my answer then...it was the only way that I knew of for assigning the correct matching Pantone color from an original document. This may require a little experimentation. Let me see if I understand this...

If I create a new "Spot Color" and name it say Pantone 032C in the colors palette of FusionPro BUT assign it cmyk values of (100, 50, 100, 0) which are values for a dark green, then FusionPro will produce the dark green within the PDF file and will show up as that on a screen view, but a high-end printer (iGen3 or HP Indigo) that can be set up for Pantone color matching will see the "ink color defined as Pantone 032C" and will print it as the correct red color?

Hmmmmm

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I apologize for my answer then...it was the only way that I knew of for assigning the correct matching Pantone color from an original document. This may require a little experimentation. Let me see if I understand this...

 

If I create a new "Spot Color" and name it say Pantone 032C in the colors palette of FusionPro BUT assign it cmyk values of (100, 50, 100, 0) which are values for a dark green, then FusionPro will produce the dark green within the PDF file and will show up as that on a screen view, but a high-end printer (iGen3 or HP Indigo) that can be set up for Pantone color matching will see the "ink color defined as Pantone 032C" and will print it as the correct red color?

 

Hmmmmm

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Yes, that is exactly how it works. Most modern digital presses (and even some offset presses) can either mix Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black (Key) inks (or apply overlapping layers of each color ink) to output a process color, or they can also apply a spot color, usually from a designated ink canister.

A spot color generally has an associated CMYK or RGB equivalent process color, the usual purpose of which is to approximate the color for non-printing purposes, such as on-screen display, or for substitution on devices which do not have access to the spot color.

However, the CMYK/RGB equivalent doesn't actually have to "look" like the actual spot color. In fact, there are certain use cases where a spot color either intentionally looks different from its CMYK/RGB equivalent, or where it doesn't actually have a CMYK/RGB equivalent at all.

For instance, if you set a spot color to Overprint, you can use it for things like lenticular printing, where raised plastic is put down on the page so that the image appears differently at different viewing angles. Spot colors can also be used to apply other textured or special inks, such as photoflourescent or "sparkly" colors, or even scratch-and-sniff inks. Those are just a few applications.

So, spot colors are indeed a very special case, where what you get from the output of a printing press can be quite different than what you see on a computer screen.

To add a little more description. With FusionPro you can define custom Spot Colors, and define a custom CMYK alternative colorspace to it.

But, FusionPro does not contain the Pantone libraries to add a Pantone color defined in a LAB colorspace (the default behavior of the Adobe apps/Pitstop, etc.).

So when sending your composed files to a Fiery/Freeflow/Creo RIP, the custom CMYK value you defined could be output as:

- The same as an InDesign generated file (by allowing the RIP to override the custom CMYK values and use the RIP's Pantone libraries in LAB)

- Pretty close as the InDesign file (not allowing the RIP to override the values, but by using a different output colorspace to convert the LAB spot colors than what you had used to define the custom CMYK values)

- Completely different than the InDesign file (not allowing the RIP to override the custom CMYK values and specifying a much different breakdown than one would expect - such as DSweet's example)

Just be aware of the settings on your RIP, and how it will effect the files you send to it.

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I just ran into an issue with something similar to this.

I custom created a pantone color. "PANTONE 281 M".

The problem I had was that with in a rule where I was applying color to certain areas of text, the color "PANTONE" could not be found.

I suspect it was the space in the name of the color that messed this up, but I am not savvy enough to figure out how to get around this.

I ended up editing (using pitstop) the other color elements to "CustomerBlue" and then adding that color to the fusionpro pdf. That worked.

I custom created a pantone color. "PANTONE 281 M".

 

The problem I had was that with in a rule where I was applying color to certain areas of text, the color "PANTONE" could not be found.

 

I suspect it was the space in the name of the color that messed this up, but I am not savvy enough to figure out how to get around this.

Well, if you were to actually post the rule, someone could very likely help you.

But in general, if you have a rule that's generating markup tags, then you need to be careful and make sure that you're putting quotes around attribute values. A tag such as <color name="PANTONE 281 M"> should work fine, but if you forget the quotes and make a tag such as <color name=PANTONE 281 M>, then the tagged markup parser treats that as a tag with three attributes: one named "name" with the value "PANTONE", and two named "281" and "M" with no values. There are probably some warning messages in your composition log (.msg) file complaining about those empty attributes.

This is similar to a very common problem when building things like DOS or UNIX command lines and forgetting to quote paths, where everything works just fine until a path has a space in it. It's just a matter of being a bit more careful with how you're building up these kinds of strings.

Another similar problem is failing to use quotes for font names in <f> tags. If you make a tag like <f name=Arial Unicode MS>, you're going to get Arial (and warnings in the log file). The correct tag would, of course, be <f name="Arial Unicode MS">.

So the problem you were having with your rule failing to properly quote attributes of markup tags really isn't specific to Pantone colors, or spot colors, or even to colors at all. It's actually a more general problem with malformed tagged markup.

thanks Dan.

That is the problem I am sure. No time to verify it right now, but I am pretty sure that is it.

I was hesitant to post the rule for the very same reason, basically that I would encounter formatting (for lack of the correct word) issues while posting code.

I figured someone would be able to answer in such a way that I would understand.

thanks again,

Scott