Spot Colors

A spot color is a specially mixed ink using in printing. Spot color inks come in a rainbow of colors, including some specialty inks such as metallic and fluorescent. Unlike CMYK or process color which creates colors by laying down layers of just 4 specific inks, spot colors are pre-mixed and you use one ink for each color in the publication.

Using an Ecrion specific extension, it is possible to declare and use spot colors in XF Ultrascale 2011. This can be done by using the spot-color function. Its syntax is one of the following forms:

spot-color(colorName,tint,rgb(colorSubstituteRed,colorSubstituteGreen,colorSubstituteBlue))

spot-color(colorName,tint,cmyk(colorSubstituteCyan,colorSubstituteMagenta,colorSubstituteYellow,colorSubstituteBlack))

•	The first parameter is the name of the color. For PDF format you can specify the spot color using the Pantone standard.

The available names for Pantone spot colors are listed in Program Files\Ecrion\XF Ultrascale 2011\Resources\SpotColors.txt file.

•	The second parameter is a number representing the spot color's tint.

•	The third attribute represents the color substitute for formats different than PDF, which can be either an RGB or a CMYK color.

In the example below you can see how it can be used:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>

<fo:root xmlns:fo="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Format" xmlns:xf="http://www.ecrion.com/xf/1.0" xmlns:xc="http://www.ecrion.com/2008/xc" xmlns:svg="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">

<fo:layout-master-set>

<fo:simple-page-master master-name="Letter Page" page-width="8.500in" page-height="11.000in">

<fo:region-body region-name="xsl-region-body" margin="0.700in" />

<fo:region-before region-name="xsl-region-before" display-align="after" extent="0.700in"/>

<fo:region-after region-name="xsl-region-after" display-align="before" extent="0.700in"/>

<fo:region-start region-name="xsl-region-start" extent="0.700in"/>

<fo:region-end region-name="xsl-region-end" extent="0.700in"/>

</fo:simple-page-master>

</fo:layout-master-set>

<fo:page-sequence master-reference="Letter Page">

<fo:static-content flow-name="xsl-region-before" font-size="12pt" font-family="Times">

<fo:block> </fo:block>

</fo:static-content>

<fo:static-content flow-name="xsl-region-after" font-size="12pt" font-family="Times">

<fo:block> </fo:block>

</fo:static-content>

<fo:static-content flow-name="xsl-region-start" font-size="12pt" font-family="Times">

<fo:block> </fo:block>

</fo:static-content>

<fo:static-content flow-name="xsl-region-end" font-size="12pt" font-family="Times">

<fo:block> </fo:block>

</fo:static-content>

<fo:flow flow-name="xsl-region-body" font-family="Times" font-size="12pt" font-weight="bold">

<fo:block color="spot-color(PANTONE 145, 5, cmyk(0,47,100,8))">Spot color</fo:block>

</fo:flow>

</fo:page-sequence>

</fo:root>

The text color for a PDF output will be Pantone 145 and for other formats will be cmyk(0,47,100,8).

The output is: