[CREATE] PDF and Pantone

[Guillermo Espertino (Gez)]

El 04/10/12 11:24, Alexandre Prokoudine escribió:
> On Thu, Oct 4, 2012 at 11:13 AM, Jakub Jankiewicz<jcubic at onet.pl>  wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I read about Pantone on Wikipedia and it's say that Free Software don't
>> support it, is there a hack that will allow to prepare pdf with pantone
>> inside?
> No hacks, just use Scribus.
>
> http://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/How_to_legally_obtain_spot_colour_palettes_for_use_in_Scribus_1.3.3.x_and_later_versions

Swatchbooker can create a sRGB converstion of the Formula books (which 
are in CIE Lab).
The Formula books are supposed to be used for spot colors and for 
intermediate/late binding 4-color process workflows (which means working 
with RGB and converting to CMYK later).
So you can have a reasonable approximation in Inkscape and GIMP, for 
instance, using Swatchbooker to convert Pantone Formula guides to .gpl 
palettes.

Pantone Bridge books are only advised to be used if your print workflow 
is CMYK from the beginning (early binding). If you'll rely on RGB assets 
(like images created in GIMP) it's better to use an intermediate or late 
binding workflow.

So here's my suggestion:
If by "Pantone PDFs" you mean Pantone Spots, use the Formula swatches, 
straight from Scribus. It's the only free application that can manage 
spot colors at the moment (it's possible to achieve something usable 
with Inkscape, then taking the file to scribus, but it's a hackish way).
If by "Pantone PDFs" you mean a PDF in CMYK with the exact CMYK values 
you get from your bridge book, you have two options: Again, to use 
Scribus which is the only early-binding-capable program in the free 
software wold, or to adopt an Intermediate or Late Binding workflow, 
using the sRGB values from the Formula swatches (not the sRGB rendering 
you have in the bridge guide, which is a screenmatch for CMYK values).

I bet that reading "work in sRGB for print" sounds very wrong, but trust 
me. If your print provider doesn't use the exact print configuration 
Pantone used for their books (which is the most probable situation), 
there will be a difference between the books and the prints you get, 
because of the paper stocks, print configuration, weather, etc.
That difference is comparable to what you get from working with a color 
managed RGB workflow. The only tricky part with intermediate binding is 
taking care of black ink when it has to be used as spot (in small size 
black body text, for instance).
For that, Scribus gives you the tools for using a pure K black in your 
design elements so you get 100%K in your output instead of composite black.

Cheers,
Gez.