[Scribus] Import Pantone Colours

[Patrick Ernst]

I was reading the recent thread about using Pantone colours and followed 
the link to the wiki for the article on "How to use spot colours with 
Scribus". Very interesting. I found the use of the Colour Editor 
interesting and was able to create a full Pantone colour set. This was 
convoluted though.

1. I created a file in /usr/lib/scribus/swatches called Scribus Pantone. 
I thought I could use this file to add colours but it turned out that 
having a blank file was useful. I was prepared to try adding values 
manually but didn't know the file format for CMYK.

2. I have the Pantone Solid to Process colour swatches and also had the 
electronic files as well (PDF, EPS, PS and TIFF) from CD. I think these 
are available from Pantone but you have to create a membership. I 
initially tried to import these and found the Pantone colours showed in 
the colour properties, including names. I found that by opening the EPS 
files and saving as SLA files I was able to use them later.

3. With no docs open, the Edit -> Colours dialogue is a bit different as 
it includes the Colour Sets option.These are limited to a drop down list 
of available sets and a Save Set option. All the other options are 
there, notably the Import option. So I selected my Scribus Pantone set, 
which was blank and Imported my SLA files (about 9). When I hit Save 
set, I was prompted for a name which I found had to be different to 
"Scribus Pantone". The reason for this, logged in as a user, the set was 
saved in my .scribus directory. When I saved it with the same name, the 
global set (empty) took precedence. I should have called the empty set 
Scribus Blank or something. When clicking Ok, my new set became the default.

Notes:

1. There appears no way of choosing which set you want to use while 
editing a document. This may not be a big problem unless you want to 
break up large sets into smaller chunks.
2. The Pantone names included both a Pantone name eg "PANTONE_5777_PC" 
and one like " FromEPS#80d9ff61". I've not found many duplicates of the 
CMYK values for these two name types but the Pantone names seem 
complete. This has me a bit confused.

So this seems like a pretty easy way to import swatches albeit with some 
limitations. Apologies if this process is already described somewhere.
PS: Is the resultant Scribus colour set suitable material to distribute 
to others?

Possible bug. I opened a file for Raw Postscript - Solid to Process.ps 
and saved this as a Scribus file as per the cut up EPS files. The file 
is only 354kb in size but describes the full range of Solid to Process 
colours. My PC went very slow and top showed that Scribus was using 
around 85% of available RAM - I have 1.5Gb installed. I had about 32Mb 
real RAM left and some swap file. After the save, I imported the SLA 
file into the Colours dialogue and experienced the same thing. After the 
save, top reported Scribus kept the 85% RAM although CPU was back to 
normal. RAM was freed only by exiting Scribus.

Rgds

Patrick

-- 
Patrick Ernst
ARO Australia Pty Ltd
Mob: 0404 883 145
Fax: 08 8219 0124
iNet: www.aroaustralia.com