[reportlab-users] Spot Colors (spotName) + PDF

[Greg Taylor]

Hello all,

After much digging for some solid information on the state of Reportlab's
spot color support, I came up empty aside from a very old post:

http://osdir.com/ml/python.reportlab.user/2003-11/msg00048.html

I wanted to see if there had been any progress made in regards to supporting
arbitrary spot colors in PDFs generated by Reportlab. I saw mention of this
being possible with EPS, but we're a strictly PDF shop.

We're considering replacing some ancient PDFLib (commercial) driven software
with Reportlab, but this is an absolute show stopper at this point. PDFLib
handled spot colors by letting you define a spot color as a name, and
provide CMYK values for what it will be rendered as in an editor.

Spot colors typically only really matter in commercial or flexographic
printing, and their colors are defined by the inks they put in the press
(spot colors that are designed to replace CMYK combinations). The appearance
in any editor/viewer (the CMYK value you can assign to the spot color) is
completely arbitrary and not at all important on the printing press. It
would also be illegal to enter some of the commercial spot color CMYK
approximations, as that may not be done without permission from Pantone and
etc.

Sorry for the long post. We tried to get this working a few times, but it
still looks like the spot colors are being converted to straight CMYK colors
(rather than a separate, named ink). Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Greg
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