[pdftex] Spot colors (was: TeX finding filenames with spaces)

[William F. Adams]

On Thursday, January 15, 2004, at 07:09  AM, David Carlisle wrote:

> latex calls spot colours "named colors" because "named" seemed a more
> generally understandable name than "spot" and because Americans have an
> aversion to the letter "u".

> Of course the top level user level documentation never says what any
> specific driver does with the colour specification, and the dvips for
> example just maps them to cmyk colours within its PS preamble, and some
> other drivers convert them to cmyk or rgb within the TeX .def 
> customisation
> layers for that driver. However there is nothing to stop the .def code
> for a driver producing code that allows colour separation, If I recall
> correctly only the textures.def file does that in the standard
> distribution.

Hmm, that's interesting --- will have to look into that.

> The set of names defaults to those names known to dvips, but an option
> to use pantone colour specifications was always a possible extension.

Except there's the matter of who pays the Pantone colour license.

There are free spot colour libraries though, GCMI (Glass Container and 
Manufacturer's) comes to mind---I'm pretty sure I've got a colour 
palette of their colours on a CD somewhere from a previous employer.

My odd-ball font installation system can set fonts up so that they 
appear in spot colours though (but really wants to distill a PostScript 
file using Acrobat, though a similar thing could be done w/ pdfTeX, but 
it would be even less efficient there).

The post-processing thing is quite easy if one has the correct tools 
--- I've been doing similar stuff for TUGboat for a while, and I think 
I used a spot colour in my TUG2003 promotional calendar ``Sharing the 
corners of your field''.

I've expanded the distribution list --- anyone who needs help w/ 
post-processing to get Pantone spot colours should contact me off-list.

William

-- 
William Adams, publishing specialist
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