On 03/28/2013 02:42 PM, Guillermo Espertino (Gez) wrote:
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).
If you are using Pantone as a spot color, the CMYK, the RGB, the Lab
doesn't matter, since you are specifying a Pantone ink. What you might
have your printer do theoretically is emulate a Pantone ink strictly as
a cost-saving measure.
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.
I don't think we really know the boundaries of what Pantone might
complain about. It may well be that in your case they would not want to
upset a customer, but I think it's appropriate to warn others to
consider what they're doing and be careful. Does it really make sense
that they would deny Scribus the right to include Pantone colors in our
palettes? What threat is that? It suggests other things going on in the
background.
Greg
_______________________________________________
CREATE mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/create
