It certainly DOES really matter that much whether the L*A*B* values are correct! But for now, it gives you a simple workaround for adding any Pantone color to your Swatches panel in InDesign without coughing up the dough for more subscription software. Whether this trick will be disabled in some future version of the Pantone Connect plug-in is anyone’s guess.

The color you see in InDesign is just a decent approximation. Not dead-on, but certainly in the ballpark, section, and row.Īnd since your print service provider is the one responsible for using the correct spot ink, you really just need to worry about telling them which ink to use and getting the spot color swatch applied in all the right places. In my tests, they were very close to what you’d get from the built-in swatch libraries. You might be wondering how accurate those Lab values are. This trick also works for spot colors that don’t exist in the outdated Pantone libraries currently installed with InDesign, like the 2022 Color of the Year, 17-3938 TCX Very Peri. You’ll get a new Lab color swatch.Īt this point, you can edit the new swatch to change the Color Type to Spot, and give it the correct name.

You can also just click the New Swatch button on the Swatches panel. Right-click the color on the toolbar or Control panel and choose Add to Swatches. This makes it appear as the current fill or stroke color in your document. In the Pantone Connect panel, click the name of the color, not the color square. Search for the color you want to add to your swatches. Make sure you have nothing selected in your layout. Or do you?Īt a recent Twin Cities InDesign User Group, Paul Nylander showed a nifty trick for getting Pantone colors into your Swatches panel as Lab colors, which you can then convert to spot colors. You can install it for free, but if you want to be able to search for and add specific Pantone colors to your Swatches panel, you need to subscribe to the paid version (currently $8/month or $36 for the first year, and $60/year thereafter). For folks who will need to work with these swatches going forward, Pantone is offering their Connect plug-in. Recently, the news of a plan to remove Pantone color libraries from Adobe apps in March 2022 has caused quite a stir.

Install inkscape swatches