[citizenpaul]

One of the.big hurdles is pantone support. At some point most places want their design to hit the real world and pantone has that market cornered. I dont just mean the technical parts pantone has expensive licensing that most FOSS doesnt and wont ever pay.

There is more than one toll troll.in that marker.

[bartvk]

I am guessing that pantone is a bunch of colors that are coded a certain way? Isn't there a common mechanism across design software? Like PDF is the platform agnostic way of sharing documents?

[WillAdams]

It is a licensing mechanism, a list of ink formulas, and (most importantly) an entire eco-system of ink swatches and sample books --- a designer can get a customer to agree to a colour, tear off a pair of ink chips, give one to the customer and one to the printer, and the expectation is that the printed piece will _exactly_ match the chips.

There are lots of alternatives --- the Glass Container Manufacturing Institute has a set of swatches which are used for packaging which the industry has agreed on.

That said, there isn't much spot colour work left, and most of what there is, is brand-specific, or done for budgetary reasons (long runs w/ just two colours).

[derrasterpunkt]

There is no Pantone Support in Adobe Software since 2022/2023.

[citizenpaul]

Oh wow really? I didnt know that. Did they launch a competing service or something?