[scribus] making your own Pantone color list

["Christoph Schäfer"]

> On Sep 19, 2013, at 9:40 PM, Gregory Pittman wrote:
> 
> > As we all know, Pantone so far maintains its position to not officially allow for Scribus to release its color list.
> 
> It's available for a license fee --- I'm sure if someone ponied up the money there'd be no problem.
> 
> Rather than going through such chicanery, why not just adopt a standard publicly available color profile such as the one GCMI used to promulgate?
> 
> Here's a .pdf showing Pantone equivalents:
> 
> http://www.ipaper.com/documents/EN/KraftBag/GCMI_COLORS.PDF
> 
> More about it here:
> 
> http://www.jimdandyboxes.com/flexographicinkcolors.html
> 
> Then we could tell users how to create PANTONE spot colours when they work out w/ their printer that they'll be printing w/ such and their printer can tell them what values to use for previewing on-screen. Adobe and Quark making PANTONE spot colours so accessible results in untold millions of dollars of lost productivity every year when printers have to verify that it's okay to convert such back to CMYK, when ad files are rendered unusable when spot colours are used w/ transparency and such conversion doesn't work, &c.
> 
> William
> 

Hi William,

GCMI colours are already being shipped with Scribus since ... I don't exactly remember when, and they're not, by default, compatible with Pantone. All you have to do to use the palette is to make it the default swatch by using Edit > Colours with no document open.

The other link you provided is far from being reliable.

Today, Pantone colour palettes are (mostly) being delivered as CIE L*a*b* files -- at least internally, and even for older Pantone swatch formats we cannot rely on simple (s)RGB or CMYK values. Moreover, Scribus needs to fully support CIE L*a*b* palettes before it can integrate current Pantone files one way or the other.

Technical considerations aside, we mustn't forget legal issues. Colour systems are subject to copyright, and we also have to deal with trademarks.

That being said, Scribus, in its current stable 1.4.x incarnation, already supports more commercial colour systems than any other software. Moreover, we are currently in deliberations with an important commercial vendor, which may result in an unprecedented number of available professional colour systems.

As to Pantone's request for fees for digital colour palettes: One day, corporate greed will be replaced by pragmatism, and there are many alternatives to Pantone, some of which are already part of Scribus.

Christoph