DEC colours

[Paul Koning]

>>>>> "John" == John Allain <allain at panix.com> writes:

 John> The thing that ticks me about Pantone, Behr, Sherman Williams
 John> or whatever is that they're proprietary systems and RGB is the
 John> "Open Source" solution, going back to basic principles and
 John> should be communicable to the proprietary mixer systems, but
 John> not the reverse.

 John> BTW I have a 2nd hand Pantone guide right here, it reads out to
 John> "three parts pantone light red and 1/8 part ..." yadda.

Pantone is a system for making up well-defined colors in a printing
process.  RGB is not applicable there.  CMYK is somewhat closer, but
it doesn't do the job either -- there are plenty of Pantone colors
that can't be created by process color (CMYK).

Pantone is proprietary, perhaps, in a sense.  But it's an industry
standard known by everyone in the printing industry world wide.  If
you want to tell a printer about a color, that's how you do it.

I suspect it predates RGB color and computer graphics, though I'm not
sure about that.

     paul