Tiny Online Tools
The number that decides the price
Every plate on a press costs money: to make, to hang, to wash. A job printed CMYK plus one Pantone is five plates. The same job with a second Pantone that appears on one page — a logo somebody pasted in — is six, and nobody notices until the quote comes back.
This tool counts them.
How spot colours are stored
A spot ink is a /Separation colour space, or one colorant inside a /DeviceN. They live in the resource dictionary, and not only on the page: form XObjects, tiling patterns, shadings, image XObjects and annotation appearance streams each carry their own resources. All of them are scanned recursively.
Two names are not inks and are treated separately: /All paints every plate at once, and /None paints nothing. Inside a /DeviceN, colorants called Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black are process inks — a DeviceN of Cyan + PANTONE 877 C needs one spot plate, not two.
The swatch is an approximation, and says so
A spot ink cannot be shown accurately on a screen; that is the point of a spot ink. Two approximations are offered, each labelled:
- From the tint transform. An exponential (
/FunctionType 2) function is evaluated exactly at full tint, and so is a stitching function built from them. The result is the alternate-space equivalent the file itself specifies — what a converting RIP would use. - Sampled from the render. For sampled (
/FunctionType 0) and PostScript calculator (/FunctionType 4) functions no evaluation is attempted. Instead the page is rendered and the pixel at the centre of the first object using that ink is read back, giving the true on-screen appearance. It is reported as sampled, never as computed.
For an actual colour decision, use a physical swatch book.
What gets flagged
A spot used on only one page or by only one object — usually an accident that costs a plate. Colorant names that differ only in spelling or case, which is two plates where one was meant. /All and /None. Overprint set on a spot object, which materially changes the printed result. And RGB content in a file with spot inks, which has to be converted before it can be separated.
Privacy
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