On Wed, 13 Apr 2011, Ben Bolker wrote:
Matthieu Stigler <matthieu.stigler <at> gmail.com> writes:
Hi
We are about to publish a book, which contains figures made with R
plots. An important detail that we did not take into account is that the
book will not be printed in 4 colors (cmyk mode), but only 2 (black
+"spotcolor"). The spotcolor we use is part of the big Pantone family.
The problem is that both pdf() and postscript() offer either rgb or
cmyk, but no spotcolors such as pantone.
Well, how could it? R's colour model is sRGB, and it has not other
way to refer to colours. The colour model is not at the level of a
package ....
I'm afraid this constraint can't be solved at all, and we can't use
R for creating these plots? I did not find any package that would
extend the colormodel to include spot colors... Did anyone had a
similar experience?
Wasn't aware of spotcolors, but I bet you could hack the PDF
reasonably easily (if you have many figures you might have to
use awk/sed/perl ?) ... if you don't use R, what is your alternative
for creating the figures?
No, PDF is not a text format and not easy to hack. It has a binary
index of byte positions so you edit it at your peril.
However, this is exactly what professionals have PDF editing tools
for. I believe I used Acrobat (not Reader) to do it when I needed to
for my books.