[scribus] Ink mixing and representation (was Re: Some clarifications regarding Pantone [was: making your own Pantone color list])

[William Adams]

On Sep 24, 2013, at 1:18 AM, Christoph Schäfer wrote:

> 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

Excellent post.

I would like to disagree somewhat here and add a feature suggestion.

The one publishing application which got colour right was Cerilica's Truism --- it used individual ink definitions instead of multiple ones, and instead, had a concept of ``substrate'' w/ attendant colour and ink absorption characteristics at the page level.

This allowed one to define a spread has having two _different_ types of paper (which often happens when one has a cross-over ad at the inside front (or back) and first (or last) pages of a magazine) and to have the ad previewed on-screen as it would actually print.

One could also do coloured paper and preview how the ink would appear on it, or separations w/ arbitrary ink (an amazing example I saw once was a jeans catalog printed in blue and brown which looked amazingly lifelike despite being printed w/ only 2 inks --- this inspired me to do a bell pepper vegetable display box once using red and green inks which we mixed to create brown so as to make a quite nice print of a full-colour photograph despite using only 2 inks).

William

-- 
William Adams
senior graphic designer
Fry Communications
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.