Pantone colour not in Illustrator CC

BTW, Pantone does not restrict sharing their libraries:

Sharing Libraries from PANTONE Color Manager with Workgroup - Pantone.com

There's a link to the latest Pantone+ libraries here:

Re: Pantone+ vs. Pantone Colors?

You may be able to purchase Pantone's Color Manager app which should come loaded with the latest libraries.  You'd get the Color Manager free with a purchase of their book(s), but you said you did not want to do that.  There is another option which is you could create a Spot Color swatch and name it 2196U, but you'd have to tell the prepress people you have your color named, but not actually built.  You'd have to be careful proceeding in that direction.

Hi

Are you (or your client) going to pay for the 'special' colours on the press, or, as many do, have them simulated from the standard CMYK inks? If the latter then I'd find out what the CMYK ink values would be and enter those in Illustrator to make custom swatches.

I've not done this myself, but I am sure that if you can get L*a*b* values (those values would be captured by reading off a pantone swatch with a spectrophotometer) then you could make a couple of custom swatches in Illustrator.

If you can possibly measure those specific Pantone inks on the actual substrate for your job, you'll be one more step towards accuracy.

As I am sure you are aware uncoated paper differs significantly in how it takes the ink, so that one Pantone (or CMYK) ink mix may appear siginificantly differently on each paper.

I hope this helps

if so, please mark it as helpful - if it solves your problem mark as "correct answer"

that helps others later who may search this forum for the same solution.

Thanks

neil barstow, colourmanagement