[pdftex] Spot colors

[Ulrich Dirr]

Hans Hagen wrote:
> 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). 

I have to agree. For simple use of spot colours I've always just used,
e.g., cyan for HKS41 or magenta for HKS17 (and HKS spot colours are
much more difficult for digital use than Pantone), and told the
printer which colour to print. This works even with duotone pictures
(Device-N).

Ulrich Dirr