[pdftex] Spot colors

[Hans Hagen]

At 12:00 15/01/2004, you wrote:
>Le jeudi 15 janvier 2004 à 10:35:21, Martin Schröder écrivit :
>
>MS> On 2004-01-14 15:13:23 -0800, Pierre MacKay wrote:
> >> Let's just take the problem I recently published here.  I am required
> >> to supply an in-RIP color separation for a two-color cover to a
> >> journal, and the colors must be specified as Pantone Spot colors. All
> >> the Latex I can find (I don't happen to use LaTeX because I had to
> >> develop my formats before LaTeX was sufficiently far along to be
> >> considered, and I don't know even now whether the in-line PostScript I
> >> have to use to get display titles right is possible in LaTeX) tells me
> >> how to use RGB and, somewhat grudgingly, how to use CMYK.  Spot colors
> >> are not even mentioned.
>
>MS> Because no normal LaTeX user needs them.
>
>If I'm not a normal user of latex, what about me ?
>
>[I'm afraid the color module in context is something I can't use as is
>in pdflatex...]

the context color related modules indeed offer spot color support (which 
means that one can also produce metapost graphics with spot colors); the 
complexity lays in (1) resource management, (2) cooperation with color 
seperation support, (3) other color features like transparency (beware: 
features like that are not pdf/x compliant).

A complication with spot colors is that ghostscript and acrobat sometimes 
have a different view on seperation and device color spaces so its a messy 
or at least fuzzy area.

Nowadays plugins (ald the full acrobat) offers features for manipulating 
colors and seperating documents based on colors (in which case consistent 
color usage it the prerequisite) so there is often no real need for it in 
tex (i for myself seldom use spot colors; i needed it for one project where 
a presumably primitive printing company was used by a customer).

Hans