[pdftex] Re: [tex-k] Spot colors

[William Adams]

I'm coming into this thread sort of late, but want to reiterate:

 - first off, spot colours aren't particularly up-to-date, they're
rather an old-fashioned thing in this day of the WWW and Hexachrome
colour models.

 - a typical work-around is to map a spot colour to one process plate,
usually cyan or magenta---mostly this was done 'cause handling duotones
was tricky---and telling the printer to suppress the blank plates (so
one doesn't pay for extra film) and to print said plate as PANTONE #foo
(though this breaks down when one wants to do a process colour signature
in a book w/ a spot colour---working through that at work now---short
version, you have to have two files)

 - I've got an ungodly, awful and inefficient hack which will let one
set up TeX to use PANTONE colours --- it'll be published in the
proceedings for TUG2003 (which I'm working on as we speak) as an
incidental mention. You can see an example of it in the TUG2003
donation-request-thank-you poster ``Sharing the corners of your field''.

 - getting TeX to use them isn't merely a technical matter (probably
verges on trivial), but also a matter of licensing (read $$$). PANTONE
is a trademark / company / commercial concern which vigorously protects
its rights, and seeks any and all opportunities to license their
intellectual property. As I noted in a previous message, this can
probably be worked around by using a free set which is done by a group
which isn't looking to eke every last penny out of every drop of ink,
but then a user would have to manually change the colour names /
descriptions / values to work w/ a printer.

 - post-processing does work, we've done a number of books thusly (check
the list of .pdfs at www.atlis.com), and I'd be glad to help anyone w/
this (but past a certain point of professional courtesy would probably
have to sic a sales rep on you ;)

William