Color wrestling

[Steve Rickaby]

At 15:03 +0000 15/11/06, Steve Rickaby wrote:

>I hope there is some color expert out that who can help me with this.
>
>In a book that uses black and one spot color, a Pantone, and which should print as a 2-color process:
>
>. An image, not created here, that is spot colored, is coming through in PDF or FrameMaker as having some CMYK content (possibly the shading).
>
>. FrameMaker and Illustrator use different names for the same Pantone, in Illustrator's case, 201U, and in FrameMaker's case, 201CVU. FrameMaker treats these as two separate colors. I can find no common definition of this Pantone in any of the two application's libraries.

I received very helpful input from Peter Gold, Tom Nilles, Scott White and Richard Doll over this, for which, my thanks.

Leaving aside the Pantone naming issue, I have found out what the problem is with the first, image, issue. The designer's original image contains only process black and a spot Pantone. However, when scaled and rotated in Illustrator, then re-saved as EPS, the resulting image was CMYK: all mention of spot color had disappeared.

I realise that this is an Illustrator problem and not a FrameMaker problem. I may be able to get around the issue by doing the scaling and mirroring in FrameMaker.  However, I am taken aback to find that Illustrator does this. It even does it if you save the EPS as a PDF and specify no color conversion.

-- 
Steve