Re: [CREATE] Free and legal download of Pantone colour palettes from Adobe

2013-03-28 Thread Guillermo Espertino (Gez) 

El 28/03/13 23:08, Gregory Pittman escribió:

On 03/28/2013 09:59 PM, Guillermo Espertino (Gez) wrote:


I think it's unlikely that they'll be against this practice, but I'm
sure they'd send us a beautiful cease and desist letter if we try to
include Pantone swatches in free software.


This is the part that I think doesn't really hang together, if this is
what Pantone is thinking. A swatch in software really isn't a swatch. A
CMYK emulation of a Pantone color might be close, but it's not the same
thing.
One might consider making a real-world swatchbook of sorts, but if you
did it "properly" you would have to use the real spot colors to make the
swatchbook, and it seems unlikely you would save any money doing that.


They not only sell printed books. They also license their system.
Although technically those swatches and specially colors are kind of 
difficult to cover with patents or copyright, they still have the 
copyright for the names and codes assigned to each color.
So if you're distributing a list with swatches called "Pantone", 
followed by a number matches their numbering scheme and the colors you 
associate to those numbers are the same they're using, then I think they 
have some grounds for a trademark claim.


Specially because they charge money to software maker to allow them to 
use those name, terms and colors.


So the problem is not really the color, nor the software. It's the 
trademark.


This has been discussed (long) before:
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20050816092029989#c350672

There some misinformed comments, but it's still an interesting read.

It's a tricky subject. They allow you end users to use the designation 
for instance when you have to send a file to the print shop, in order to 
tell the printer what color has to be used, but I don't think they would 
allow organizations or developers to ship something called "a Pantone 
palette" in a program without asking for the usual royalties.


Gez.
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Re: [CREATE] Free and legal download of Pantone colour palettes from Adobe

2013-03-28 Thread Gregory Pittman 

On 03/28/2013 09:59 PM, Guillermo Espertino (Gez) wrote:


I think it's unlikely that they'll be against this practice, but I'm 
sure they'd send us a beautiful cease and desist letter if we try to

include Pantone swatches in free software.

This is the part that I think doesn't really hang together, if this is 
what Pantone is thinking. A swatch in software really isn't a swatch. A 
CMYK emulation of a Pantone color might be close, but it's not the same 
thing.
One might consider making a real-world swatchbook of sorts, but if you 
did it "properly" you would have to use the real spot colors to make the 
swatchbook, and it seems unlikely you would save any money doing that.


Greg
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Re: [CREATE] Free and legal download of Pantone colour palettes from Adobe

2013-03-28 Thread Guillermo Espertino (Gez) 

El 28/03/13 21:15, Gregory Pittman escribió:


If you are using Pantone as a spot color, the CMYK, the RGB, the Lab
doesn't matter, since you are specifying a Pantone ink. What you might
have your printer do theoretically is emulate a Pantone ink strictly as
a cost-saving measure.


Exactly my point. If it's spot, the RIP will create an extra 
monochromatic plate with the coverage of that spot color, so the Lab 
value is irrelevant.
I guess the reason of storing the values in CIE Lab is just to offer a 
device independent reference which allows flexibility to convert to 
other spaces like the usual working RGBs or display profiles.
As I mentioned, if you're using a late/intermediate binding RGB-based 
workflow and no spot colors, those colors will be converted from Lab to 
your working RGB space, unless you're explicitly working in Lab "mode" 
in an application that allows it.
And you won't send Lab to a print shop, so in some point your lab will 
become RGB or CMYK.

As I said, no difference.

I mentioned the Formula guides (Lab) as the right ones for spot because 
Pantone recommends that. The reason behind this recommendation is 
simple: You'll get the best on-screen approximation possible from Lab to 
your working or display RGB, while previewing with CMYK (bridge books) 
would mean using swatches that already had a color transform to a 
constrained gamut.
Most of the Pantone spot colors aren't printable in CMYK, so using the 
CMYK values to preview those colors is a mistake.



I don't think we really know the boundaries of what Pantone might
complain about. It may well be that in your case they would not want to
upset a customer, but I think it's appropriate to warn others to
consider what they're doing and be careful. Does it really make sense
that they would deny Scribus the right to include Pantone colors in our
palettes? What threat is that? It suggests other things going on in the
background.


I think that including this kind of resources in free software should be 
avoided.
It's not clear if they're ok or not with it, but it's good to keep in 
mind that their business includes selling royalties of their products to 
software makers.
Some Pantone partners could be unhappy to know that Pantone ask them 
money for the same we're using for free, and that's where our luck ends.
We should keep this as an "import" mechanism. Pantone allows that and 
offers resources for unsupported software (the EPS files I mentioned 
before) so what we're doing here is importing their data to our 
programs, instead of distributing their possibly copyrighted material.


I think it's unlikely that they'll be against this practice, but I'm 
sure they'd send us a beautiful cease and desist letter if we try to

include Pantone swatches in free software.

So far we're good. I see no reason to try something more dangerous :)

Gez.
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Re: [CREATE] Free and legal download of Pantone colour palettes from Adobe

2013-03-28 Thread Gregory Pittman 

On 03/28/2013 02:42 PM, Guillermo Espertino (Gez) wrote:

El 28/03/13 03:25, "Christoph Schäfer" escribió:

What the downloading option in SwatchBooker does is accessing public 
data for an iPhone app, and what you get is RGB values which are not 
intended for use in professional publishing. The files made available 
by Adobe are spot/CMYK/RGB colours stored as L*a*b*. In other words, 
in terms of professional publishing, the data downloaded by 
SwatchBooker are toys, whereas the data made available by Adobe are 
"the real thing".>


I think you're wrong. The X-Ref site has the right values and 
apparently Swatchbooker downloads them properly.
It's easy to check it: Just convert any of the books to the 
Swatchbooker format and open the file with Swatchbooker Editor or with 
a text editor.
Formula books are stored as Lab and sRGB values, Bridge books as 
Lab+sRGB+CMYK


Swatchbooker does convert those swatches to RGB and CMYK when you save 
them as gpl or Scribus XML, but I guess that's because those palette 
formats (and the applications that support them) don't support other 
color format for their swatches.


CMYK isn't a problem since the values are kept, sRGB could of course 
clip the gamut of the original colors, but guess what: if you're 
working in sRGB space in any application and you're not using the 
Formula books as spot colors, you'll get exactly the same (the Lab 
colors converted to sRGB).



If you are using Pantone as a spot color, the CMYK, the RGB, the Lab 
doesn't matter, since you are specifying a Pantone ink. What you might 
have your printer do theoretically is emulate a Pantone ink strictly as 
a cost-saving measure.
Moreover, consider yourself lucky that Pantone hasn't unleashed an 
army of lawyers on you yet ;) Maybe this is due to your jurisdiction, 
but it is unthinkable that Pantone wouldn't object to the 
distribution of their digital colour palettes without a proper 
licence agreement. The web is full of sites that used to list Pantone 
colours but were forced to remove them after Pantone threatened legal 
action. Whether we like it or not (in terms of results), Pantone is 
just as entitled to use copyright and trademark protection for their 
purposes as are Free Software and Open Content projects. If we don't 
respect the rights of others, we lose the moral rights to enforce our 
own Free and Open licenses. It could also seal doors that are 
currently closed, but may be opened in the future (think of IBM, for 
instance): "Constant dripping wears away the stone."


First of all, I'm legally entitled to use Pantone swatches with my 
software since I bought them their books, which include software and 
swatches in digital format.
However, they don't provide a suitable format for the software I use, 
so I have to find a way to "convert" their swatches to a format I can 
use (they offer some EPS files in the CD that comes with the books for 
cases like mine. Conversion is contemplated).
They also made their swatches publicly available from their X-Ref 
website, and when I visit their site to check the values my browser 
does exactly the same that swatchbooker does, it queries their 
database and picks the data up from it.
I don't think we really know the boundaries of what Pantone might 
complain about. It may well be that in your case they would not want to 
upset a customer, but I think it's appropriate to warn others to 
consider what they're doing and be careful. Does it really make sense 
that they would deny Scribus the right to include Pantone colors in our 
palettes? What threat is that? It suggests other things going on in the 
background.


Greg
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Re: [CREATE] #codethesquare open call for sketches

2013-03-28 Thread Michael Schumacher 

On 27.03.2013 13:46, Monica Cachafeiro wrote:

Hi all,

We want to share with you the project #codethesquare, an open platform
to show Processing.js sketches on the medialab-prado digital facade.

>

http://programalaplaza.medialab-prado.es/



Nice! I gave it try by throwing some random numbers at the screen, as 
blue and green colored squares:


http://programalaplaza.medialab-prado.es/sketch/view/3ff51722e289577ead274d6b69b74bc5


There is a permanent call already open and we will show the sketches
summited during theLibre Graphics meeting
.


The Play and Preview buttons are strictly local playback, right? In 
order to have a sketch show up on the building, I'll have to submit it?


--
Regards,
Michael
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Re: [CREATE] Free and legal download of Pantone colour palettes from Adobe

2013-03-28 Thread Guillermo Espertino (Gez) 

El 28/03/13 03:25, "Christoph Schäfer" escribió:


What the downloading option in SwatchBooker does is accessing public data for an iPhone app, 
and what you get is RGB values which are not intended for use in professional publishing. 
The files made available by Adobe are spot/CMYK/RGB colours stored as L*a*b*. In other 
words, in terms of professional publishing, the data downloaded by SwatchBooker are toys, 
whereas the data made available by Adobe are "the real thing".>


I think you're wrong. The X-Ref site has the right values and apparently 
Swatchbooker downloads them properly.
It's easy to check it: Just convert any of the books to the Swatchbooker 
format and open the file with Swatchbooker Editor or with a text editor.
Formula books are stored as Lab and sRGB values, Bridge books as 
Lab+sRGB+CMYK


Swatchbooker does convert those swatches to RGB and CMYK when you save 
them as gpl or Scribus XML, but I guess that's because those palette 
formats (and the applications that support them) don't support other 
color format for their swatches.


CMYK isn't a problem since the values are kept, sRGB could of course 
clip the gamut of the original colors, but guess what: if you're working 
in sRGB space in any application and you're not using the Formula books 
as spot colors, you'll get exactly the same (the Lab colors converted to 
sRGB).


In my oppinion, the Lab values of Pantone books only matter if you're 
working in Lab Space. If you're using them as spot colors, the color is 
only used for previews and doesn't matter for print.
And if you're working in RGB and convert those spot colors to RGB, 
you'll get exactly what you get here (well, in this case you only get 
sRGB but in theory you could convert the formula books to AdobeRGB using 
swatchbooker too).


As I said above, the CMYK values aren't a problem.
If you're using an application that supports CMYK, like Scribus, you 
should be using the Bridge books, not the Formula books. And in that 
case the program will use the exact CMYK values from the swatch.
Swatchbooker gets those CMYK values straight from the Bridge books from 
X-Ref, and the values are RIGHT in the resulting palette.


I can't see why this isn't suitable for professional publishing and why 
you say the values obtained by Swatchbooker are just "toys".


And more importantly, you won't get anything better using the files you 
linked. It's exactly the same. If you're working in RGB, the Lab values 
from Formula will get converted to your RGB space, no matter what 
program you use (libre or not). If you're working in CMYK, the Formula 
guides have no use (unless you're using them for spot plates) and the 
CMYK values from the bridge guide will be used.



Moreover, consider yourself lucky that Pantone hasn't unleashed an army of lawyers on you 
yet ;) Maybe this is due to your jurisdiction, but it is unthinkable that Pantone 
wouldn't object to the distribution of their digital colour palettes without a proper 
licence agreement. The web is full of sites that used to list Pantone colours but were 
forced to remove them after Pantone threatened legal action. Whether we like it or not 
(in terms of results), Pantone is just as entitled to use copyright and trademark 
protection for their purposes as are Free Software and Open Content projects. If we don't 
respect the rights of others, we lose the moral rights to enforce our own Free and Open 
licenses. It could also seal doors that are currently closed, but may be opened in the 
future (think of IBM, for instance): "Constant dripping wears away the stone."


First of all, I'm legally entitled to use Pantone swatches with my 
software since I bought them their books, which include software and 
swatches in digital format.
However, they don't provide a suitable format for the software I use, so 
I have to find a way to "convert" their swatches to a format I can use 
(they offer some EPS files in the CD that comes with the books for cases 
like mine. Conversion is contemplated).
They also made their swatches publicly available from their X-Ref 
website, and when I visit their site to check the values my browser does 
exactly the same that swatchbooker does, it queries their database and 
picks the data up from it.
For convenience, instead of visiting the site everytime I need one of 
those values I use swatchbooker to get those values and save them in a file.
There's no practical difference between doing that and picking a pen and 
a piece of paper and copy the values I need.


I can't see how their lawyers would waste time and resources trying to
catch a paying customer that just uses a script to access the data the 
company already entitled him to get.
And if they do, all they'd get is one less paying customer, because I'd 
not only stop buying their books for good, but I'd also ask my money 
back because I can't use the tool I paid for.


Swatchbooker has been out for a couple of years (including the feature 
for downloading the