Expert: Ken Black - 3/2/2011

Question
Hi Ken,

We have just recently installed the Pantone Plus Color to Indesign. We realized that Illustrator removes the existing library and replaces them with Pantone Plus. Not so for Indesign. So, to avoid future confusion between Indesign/Illus/Photosh, we attempted to remove the older Pantones from our Indesign library which only resulted in Indesign crashing when a new swatch was added. We reinstalled the CS3 software to avoid the persistent crashing. That is the history.

Now we are trying to use the Pantone Plus library, but the field where one is to enter the color in the swatches pane won't accept or find the color when entered. The first question is: HOW DO WE ENTER A COLOR IN THE FIELD TO ADD A COLOR TO THE SWATCHES PANE? There was no problem with entering the color numbers when old Pantone was being used, but Pantone Plus results in not being able to enter a number and voila.

The next question I have is: WHY ARE THE COLORS DISPLAYED (BY ICON NEXT TO THE COLOR) AS LAB RATHER THAN CMYK? IS THERE A BENEFIT TO KEEPING THEM AS LAB AND IF NOT, HOW DO WE DISPLAY THEM AS CMYK?

That's it at the moment. If these can't be resolved, there may be no point in moving forward?

Thank you,
Tracy

Answer
Hi Tracy,

As far as the crashing and overall buggy behavior behind the new color library and Indesign, I really have nothing to offer.

To change your color setting from LAB to CMYK, with Indesign running, but without a document open, click the option arrow in the swatch palette, choose Ink Manager and uncheck the All spots to LAB box. That should do it.

Thanks,

Ken Black