[scribus] Some clarifications regarding Pantone [was: making your own Pantone color list]

["Christoph Schäfer"]

Hi all,

In the light of the discussion about home-made or downloaded "Pantone" palettes I think it could be useful to provide some background information about Pantone swatches (these also apply to others, like HKS).

The first important thing to know is that a single Pantone colour, one that can be identified by a number, doesn't exist. Here's an excerpt from a directory listing of InDesign with all Pantone updates installed: 

PANTONE metallic coated.acb
PANTONE pastel coated.acb
PANTONE pastel uncoated.acb
PANTONE process coated.acb
PANTONE process uncoated.acb
PANTONE solid coated.acb
PANTONE solid matte.acb
PANTONE solid to process EURO.acb
PANTONE solid to process.acb
PANTONE solid uncoated.acb
PANTONE(R) Goe(TM) coated.acb
PANTONE(R) Goe(TM) uncoated.acb
PANTONE(R) GoeBridge(TM) coated.acb
PANTONE+ CMYK Coated.acb
PANTONE+ CMYK Uncoated.acb
PANTONE+ Color Bridge Coated.acb
PANTONE+ Color Bridge Uncoated.acb
PANTONE+ Pastels & Neons Coated.acb
PANTONE+ Pastels & Neons Uncoated.acb
PANTONE+ Premium Metallics Coated.acb
PANTONE+ Solid Coated.acb

There is also a subdirectory called "Legacy" that contains the following files:

PANTONE+ Solid Uncoated.acbl
PANTONE metallic coated.acbl
PANTONE process coated.acbl
PANTONE solid coated.acbl
PANTONE solid matte.acbl
PANTONE solid to process.acbl
PANTONE solid uncoated.acbl

That's a lot, isn't it? To make it easier for us, we can subtract metallic, pastel and neon colours, as these are different categories with a different numbering scheme. This leaves us with:

PANTONE process coated.acb
PANTONE process uncoated.acb
PANTONE solid coated.acb
PANTONE solid matte.acb
PANTONE solid to process EURO.acb
PANTONE solid to process.acb
PANTONE solid uncoated.acb
PANTONE(R) Goe(TM) coated.acb
PANTONE(R) Goe(TM) uncoated.acb
PANTONE(R) GoeBridge(TM) coated.acb
PANTONE+ CMYK Coated.acb
PANTONE+ CMYK Uncoated.acb
PANTONE+ Color Bridge Coated.acb
PANTONE+ Color Bridge Uncoated.acb
PANTONE+ Solid Coated.acbl

and 

PANTONE process coated.acbl
PANTONE solid coated.acbl
PANTONE solid matte.acbl
PANTONE solid to process.acbl
PANTONE solid uncoated.acbl

The existence of these many palettes cannot be properly understood without a little knowledge about the history of the Pantone colour matching system(s).

The palettes called "PANTONE xyz" are the "classic" PMS colours. The classic PMS has nowadays been replaced by PANTONE+, which is mostly an update that added more colours, but also changed the values of some existing ones. Before Pantone released PANTONE+, it tried to introduce a completely new system called GOE, which wasn't as successful as they hoped for (hence the update of PMS to PANTONE+, I think). For our purpose we can ignore GOE, since most people think of the classic/PANTONE+ numbering scheme when they say "Pantone".

If we compare the palettes in the PANTONE or PANTONE+ branches respectively, we'll quickly determine that the number of colours and the colour *numbers* are the same, but if we compare colours with identical numbers in different files, we have to notice that the differences are often *huge*. Don't believe me? Look at this example: http://printpraxis.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Pantone-Vergleich.jpg

The reason for the huge deviation is, of course, that each palette has been created for a specific output target, namely coated and uncoated paper (HKS went even further and added two other output targets for each colour set: newspaper printing and continuous printing). Moreover, Pantone created several versions for each swatch: "solid" (spot colours), "CMYK" (CMYK colours) and "solid to process", now renamed to "Color Bridge" (pure CMYK colours with the closest approximation to a spot colour).

It should be clear by now that a simple colour number like "PMS 100" isn't really helpful to anyone, and, unfortunately, another issue makes it even worse, which is why I mentioned the subdirectory "Legacy". The files in "Legacy" use the legacy colour model (CMYK), whereas the newer ones in "Swatch Libraries" use CIE L*a*b*! Thus, using hand-made "Pantone" RGB palettes is pretty pointless -- it might make people feel better, but it's without any relevance with respect to colour correctness at the print shop. This is also the reason why Olivier's "Pantone" script doesn't help with print jobs. All it does is downloading colours from an online repo for smartphone and tablet apps (!), and these colours are in RGB (i.e., more or less a gimmick). In other words, those "unofficial" swatches are without practical use, and an RGB colour with a name like "PMS 100" is as useful as an RGB colour called "My favourite blue" or "Tracy" -- it doesn't make a difference.

Now the legal part: I'm no lawyer, but I've been trying to find reliable and freely available Pantone colour sets on the web, and I stopped counting the number of pages that displayed a message like "We have received a cease and desist letter from Pantone and had to remove the content/download." And that was before Pantone had been bought by X-Rite! X-Rite is known to be openly hostile to Open Source, and we can expect them to sue the Scribus Team to death if we get even close to something like providing access to their colour system without a licence. One of our partners in the colour industry has confirmed to me that X-Rite/Pantone is really hyper-aggressive when it comes to their IP. They may look the other way if the old "PMS Colors" (which are outdated; see above) are being distributed in RGB, but, as I wrote, Pantone RGB palettes are useless for print jobs. 

As to the argument that Scribus doesn't sell real colours: Pantone doesn't either. Pantone's business model is to sell colour fans/chips/books, create colour trends, license their IP (software, digital colour swatches etc.), and certification of ink vendors. 

Bottom line: 
Those who need one or more Pantone palettes can get them legally from other sources (e.g., demo versions of ID, QXP, CorelDraw etc.) and convert them using SwatchBooker.


Christoph