Using Pantone® Colours from VersaWorks V4.8 onwards

With the release of version 4.8 of Roland VersaWorks RIP software, Roland DG have added support for Pantone® colours by adding six libraries from the PANTONE PLUS and Goe™ product lines.

The first important point to note is that support for these Pantone libraries is embeded in the RIP itself, their accuracy is dependent upon the accuracy of the Media Profile you are using. Whilst you will get reasonable results using any of the built in Generic Profiles, real accuracy will be obtained with dedicated media profiles. Unlike the RVW colour tables, you do not print swatches of the Pantone Colours, you should purchase actual Pantone reference books and use these for checking colours.

The mechanics of using these Pantone colours involves selecting the correct Pantone colour in your design software and ensuring that the PDF or EPS file you create from the package exports these Pantone colours as Spot colours and does not convert them to Process colours. When you open the file in VersaWorks, go to the File Format tab and, if your export has worked correctly, you should see the Pantone colours you used in the file listed in the tables. In this first release of Pantone support, it seems you need to double click each colour to ensure the correction is enabled - this may change in the next update.

If your Pantone colours are not listed and you are sure they have not been converted to Process colours, it may be that your design package is not exporting them with the correct name format. If this is the case, you can track them down with the new Spot or Named colour support in VersaWorks and map them to the correct Pantone colour in the RIP. More on this shortly.

We will be adding full details of how to exploit Pantone® colours in the near future but for now please call 01380 871962 for information