El 28/03/13 03:25, "Christoph Schäfer" escribió:
What the downloading option in SwatchBooker does is accessing public data for an iPhone app,
and what you get is RGB values which are not intended for use in professional publishing.
The files made available by Adobe are spot/CMYK/RGB colours stored as L*a*b*. In other
words, in terms of professional publishing, the data downloaded by SwatchBooker are toys,
whereas the data made available by Adobe are "the real thing".>
I think you're wrong. The X-Ref site has the right values and apparently
Swatchbooker downloads them properly.
It's easy to check it: Just convert any of the books to the Swatchbooker
format and open the file with Swatchbooker Editor or with a text editor.
Formula books are stored as Lab and sRGB values, Bridge books as
Lab+sRGB+CMYK
Swatchbooker does convert those swatches to RGB and CMYK when you save
them as gpl or Scribus XML, but I guess that's because those palette
formats (and the applications that support them) don't support other
color format for their swatches.
CMYK isn't a problem since the values are kept, sRGB could of course
clip the gamut of the original colors, but guess what: if you're working
in sRGB space in any application and you're not using the Formula books
as spot colors, you'll get exactly the same (the Lab colors converted to
sRGB).
In my oppinion, the Lab values of Pantone books only matter if you're
working in Lab Space. If you're using them as spot colors, the color is
only used for previews and doesn't matter for print.
And if you're working in RGB and convert those spot colors to RGB,
you'll get exactly what you get here (well, in this case you only get
sRGB but in theory you could convert the formula books to AdobeRGB using
swatchbooker too).
As I said above, the CMYK values aren't a problem.
If you're using an application that supports CMYK, like Scribus, you
should be using the Bridge books, not the Formula books. And in that
case the program will use the exact CMYK values from the swatch.
Swatchbooker gets those CMYK values straight from the Bridge books from
X-Ref, and the values are RIGHT in the resulting palette.
I can't see why this isn't suitable for professional publishing and why
you say the values obtained by Swatchbooker are just "toys".
And more importantly, you won't get anything better using the files you
linked. It's exactly the same. If you're working in RGB, the Lab values
from Formula will get converted to your RGB space, no matter what
program you use (libre or not). If you're working in CMYK, the Formula
guides have no use (unless you're using them for spot plates) and the
CMYK values from the bridge guide will be used.
Moreover, consider yourself lucky that Pantone hasn't unleashed an army of lawyers on you
yet ;) Maybe this is due to your jurisdiction, but it is unthinkable that Pantone
wouldn't object to the distribution of their digital colour palettes without a proper
licence agreement. The web is full of sites that used to list Pantone colours but were
forced to remove them after Pantone threatened legal action. Whether we like it or not
(in terms of results), Pantone is just as entitled to use copyright and trademark
protection for their purposes as are Free Software and Open Content projects. If we don't
respect the rights of others, we lose the moral rights to enforce our own Free and Open
licenses. It could also seal doors that are currently closed, but may be opened in the
future (think of IBM, for instance): "Constant dripping wears away the stone."
First of all, I'm legally entitled to use Pantone swatches with my
software since I bought them their books, which include software and
swatches in digital format.
However, they don't provide a suitable format for the software I use, so
I have to find a way to "convert" their swatches to a format I can use
(they offer some EPS files in the CD that comes with the books for cases
like mine. Conversion is contemplated).
They also made their swatches publicly available from their X-Ref
website, and when I visit their site to check the values my browser does
exactly the same that swatchbooker does, it queries their database and
picks the data up from it.
For convenience, instead of visiting the site everytime I need one of
those values I use swatchbooker to get those values and save them in a file.
There's no practical difference between doing that and picking a pen and
a piece of paper and copy the values I need.
I can't see how their lawyers would waste time and resources trying to
catch a paying customer that just uses a script to access the data the
company already entitled him to get.
And if they do, all they'd get is one less paying customer, because I'd
not only stop buying their books for good, but I'd also ask my money
back because I can't use the tool I paid for.
Swatchbooker has been out for a couple of years (including the feature
for downloading the swatches from Pantone's site) and Pantone lawyers
haven't said anything about it.
It would be a stupid move if they do. They don't offer any support for
Libre software, so a tool like Swatchbooker doesn't harm them. Actually,
it helps them selling more guides to some free software users that
wouldn't buy them if they couldn't use them in libre software.
Gez.
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