Pantone PDF Book

[rich apollo]

Thank you, it is good to see a device independent swatch book presented, as opposed to the regular old CMYK variants! Which L*a*b* Pantone library did you base the colour builds off - 2000, 2006 etc?

Gosh, I'm glad folks find them useful.

Stephen, you know, I'm not sure. I originally built the InDesign documents back in '04 and '06. To create the PDF's, however, I just opened the files the other day and exported out of CS5.5. I set the spots to use the standard Lab values. So, I think those should be the latest values.

[Stephen Marsh]

Nice job rich

Your pdfs allow me to show the people in customer service how crappy our color laser printer can be .........We have problems with dark blue pms colors printing more black than blue.

The input to the print is device independent...

So what about the colour transform to the device dependent colour of the output? When printing from Acrobat or Acrobat reader, what colour management settings are you using for the print? What is the destination profile? Is the profile factory/canned or custom?

Some colours such as darker richer or bright blues are always going to be problematic for (laser) print output, however with colour management you should be able to get better results than simply assuming sRGB as the input to the device space.

As these charts are spots, one may also need to look into spot colour tables in that may be overriding the original input colour.


Stephen Marsh

[jricart]

Thanks Stephen for the info. I just learned something new!

JRT

JRT,

Try the object inspector in output preview, rather than separations preview and see my previous note about the display limit in output preview vs. what is actually in the file.

You could also try placing say the last PDF page in InDesign or opening the last page in Illustrator (yes I know that one should not do that!). The later spots are still spots.

One can also use Acrobat 9 preflight/single checks/colour/is spot colour or spot colour is used

Stephen Marsh

[SteveOttley]

Here are a pair I built. Do they have what you need? Or are you looking for the CMYK mixes? If you want that, send me your output profile and I can generate a text document of tint mixes specific to your output condition.

Hi Rich,

What software program are you using to take an output profile to generate a text document containing CMYK %'s? I've dabbled with ProfileMaker 5 and can export a spreadsheet of CMYK %'s based upon my devices ICC profile; but not sure how to convert the spreadsheet of numeric CMYK% values to actual color swatches/charts.

Is this possible in an Adobe product to take in a spreadsheet and generate a series of color swatches/charts automatically with a script? It would take a long time to manually enter in each color as a named separation.

Attached is my Excel spreadsheet of exported CMYK %'s. Based upon this how do I go about generating color swatches off of this in an automated way? Thank you.

-Steve

[leonardr]

PDF itself has a limit on the number of spot colours in a file, does it not???

No, PDF has no such limit.

Or is that only for display in the list in say output preview, while the file itself will still contain the greater amount of spots than is visible in Acrobat Pro?

EDIT: The limit is in the display in Acrobat Pro, it appears that all the spots are still in the PDF file, even if they can't be displayed in the colour list.

Correct. The Output Preview window in Acrobat Pro is limited to 32 spot colors. A real world document should never have that many - but we want to give you at least some flexibility.

[rich apollo]

Hi Rich,

What software program are you using to take an output profile to generate a text document containing CMYK %'s? I've dabbled with ProfileMaker 5 and can export a spreadsheet of CMYK %'s based upon my devices ICC profile;

I was working with ProfileMaker, so I was gonna' do exactly what you've described. Hmm. To generate a palette... Let me look at it, I'm sure there's a way.