On Thu, 2004-07-08 at 23:07, Marti Maria wrote:
> Hi,
> 
[snip]
> 
> Photoshop can give you SWOP (or whatever) CMYK for given spot color names. 
> If you need  just a few colors post here the names and I will give you the CMYK 
> values. Remember first to check if we are dealing with SWOP (important!)
> 
> Hope this helps
> Marti Maria


this discussion completely fascinates me, as i realized about two years
ago:
1) F/LOSS does not support pantone spot colors.

2) at that time, it did not even support CMYK offset standards, such as
US newsprint SWOP, eurstandard etc. have begun to see this being
supported in scribus, via lcms but not yet in inkscape.

3) i don't think pantone would be supported in a gpl or LGPL way for
FLOSS. this because pantone color sytems are copyrighted, patented, and
given under a license to whichever commercial software has to use it.
pantone even sells a separate and bigger collection of its matching
systems as a software, that plugs into various software, and so on. so
why would they give the specs away free, and with freedom.

4) i have often thought about this problem, and realized this workflow
of going to photoshop, look up a color, come back, mark it. is
counter-productive.

5) for artwork i create where i handle the spot-color separations, the
task is easy. i can pick up any representative color to a pantone number
given by a client, get the proofs approved, and then create
black-and-white spots, marking the actual ink to use as the pantone
name, and leave it to the print shop or bureau to use that ink can and
match the colors in the printed job.

6) for artwork where a pantone color has to be used in job that is
cmyk-separated, marti's approach is reasonably correct, with
calibration, etc. however, you could add one more process: purchase a
spectrophotometer, physically measure the pantone color (from the
pantone swatches you go buy from an art shop) and key those values in to
a color-calibrated, color-managed (lcms) application. you could simply
read the value off a customer supplied sample too.
i don't use a spectrophotometer yet, as i haven't discovered yet which
one works under gnulinux. however, a scientist and researcher at
http://www.iucaa.ernet.in/ [The Inter-University Centre for Astronomy
and Astrophysics (IUCAA) ] in pune, india, told me he custom-wrote a
program to get this working under gnulinux, *nix, *bsd, whatever. i
requested him to publish it on the web, but haven't heard from him yet
(too busy peering into outer-space to worry about us lesser mortals, i
guess :-) )

otoh, if someone on this list knows an affordable spectrophotometer that
works, lemme know.

7) finally, the solution i propose for this problem is simple: i wish to
start a project in the spirit of FLOSS, published under an LGPL or
whatever license you feel is more contextual. the project is a realworld
project: 
a) take the standard unix color names in a system (also borrowed by web
hexcode II) and add more colors to this system.
b) take a calibrated monitor, use a spectrophotometer, and measure their
colors.
c) publish the measurements, publish the specs, and everything, under a
LGPL.
d) encourage people to write plug-ins for cinepaint, gimp, inkscape,
scribus, and any other app that requires it (something like the ladspa
of colors: http://www.ladspa.org/), heck! even for the OS.

e) more importantly, let anyone anywhere, produce swatches, produce and
print color reference books, perforated color swatches, and whatever
reference material they like, in the physical world. they can do this
royalty-free, non-exclusive, and sell at whatever price they like,
letting the market forces decide.

f) certifiying that somebody's realworld reference sheet conforms and
reproduces the colors sufficiently accurately is essential. i leave this
to the opensource community, its organizations, (OSDN?) its players (HP,
IBM, Cinepaint, LCMS?) to figure out how to put in place an
infrastructure for doing this. i freely admit, i am clueless. i have
this idea, and wish to share it.

g) the name of the project could be interesting: OpenPant, or PantOpen,
hehehehehe. but then again,a name has to be chosen after some research
and evaluation. [google for pantopen shows it as the name of some
chemical in pharmaceuticals...]

finally, this project does not really compete with any pantone or
several other ways of color labelling and communication systems. in
fact, all of them exist concurrently in the market, and even in
software. just that no one thought of one built ground up for the floss
community. the use of the l-gpl allows people to use these in non-free
software as well, and in other devices, such as symbian cellphones, etc.


i guess one of you could post this idea to slashdot as well, but the
time has come to take this further.

:-)
LL




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