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Silly-V
Silly-V
Legend
October 5, 2015
Question

Illustrator CC Book Color vs Spot Color PANTONE+

  • October 5, 2015
  • 1 reply
  • 9766 views

Hi! Here's a question about a little detail regarding PANTONE+ spot colors.
I've got a script that makes PANTONE+ colors inside a document using the available scripting methods, which produce a spot color with the desired Lab color values, but when double-clicking and bringing up the swatch dialog it does not default to the grayed-out "Book Color" option in the Color Mode dropdown.

However, it does have the Book Color option in that dropdown and if it's selected and applied, the next time this swatch is double-clicked and dialog appears, the proper Book Color mode is selected and appropriate fields are grayed out.

My question is: considering the functions of spot colors in Illustrator, ink plating and appearance and anything else, does my script-made swatch bear any effect on the document that would make it in any way different than a regular document where the Book Color is shown as default in the swatch options dialog?

In Mordy Golding's explanation of Book Color mode for Pre-CS6 versions, he states that Book Colors came with hidden information which displays PANTONE-listed Lab values which relate to the Pre-CS6 CMYK-based PANTONE swatches. Now that we have PANTONE+, and Lab is the default base for the book swatches, I wonder if there is any other property that may not be considered by some function of the application if the swatch has the correct name and Lab values while not having the Book Color mode explicitly selected.

Also, if there's an undocumented property for setting the other Color Modes which can appear in this dropdown, that would also be useful information. Our current available options for SpotColorKind are just SPOTCMYK, SPOTLAB and SPOTRGB

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1 reply

Qwertyfly___
Qwertyfly___
Legend
October 5, 2015

The only difference I can see is that bookcolor is set.

If i open options for a pantone swatch from the color book,

then change to lab, tweak a value then set back to book color, it reverts to the original values.

its like the Book color is just to say that it matches to the installed book color values

its a shame we can't access installed color books directly using JS.

1 more thing to add the the very long wish list...

Silly-V
Silly-VAuthor
Legend
October 5, 2015

Qwertyfly... wrote:

its a shame we can't access installed color books directly using JS.

Yea, so I'm just pulling the values from a CSV and this is my result.

I also guess that someone can have all 1300 colors in separate documents in a folder and use a file-place to bring each one in as well, which surely would give the genuine PANTONE to the document. If I find that there in fact is some horrible necessary property that a spot has that comes with the Book Color setting for some printing or whatever function of Illustrator, that is what I may have to resort to.

Qwertyfly___
Qwertyfly___
Legend
October 5, 2015

having them in a separate document is how I have seen it done before.

that is just painful though.

the .acb swatch book could be the way to go.

if we can find a way to decode the color values.

the actual color values look to be the only part of the file that is not in English...

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