What about Pantone, HKS and others?

## What about Pantone®, HKS® and others?

While Scribus is in all likelihood being shipped with the largest amount of color palettes of all DTP or drawing programs, some important vendors are obviously missing. Most notably Pantone (United States), HKS (Germany), and the Japanese vendors Toyo, DIC, and Focoltone either aren’t available or seem to be unavailable in Scribus. This is not the fault of Scribus, because we have contacted these and other vendors to negotiate a license agreement. As you can see in the list of solid color palettes this was successful in many cases, but ended without positive results with the vendors mentioned above. Below we’ll show you some workarounds that may help you to legally acquire these color swatches from other resources and use them in Scribus.

### Converting Palettes from other Programs

If you happen to own a license for a commercial program or downloaded and installed a test version that is being shipped with swatch files from the vendor you need (e.g., QuarkXPress, InDesign, Illustrator, or CorelDraw), you can probably convert these files to Scribus’s own XML format using SwatchBooker. For a list of file formats supported by SwatchBooker see the list on the SwatchBooker website. After the conversion you can install or import the Scribus XML palette files.

Make sure that the license of the program whose swatch files you convert doesn’t prohibit conversion and/or use with another program.

### Particular Vendors

#### Pantone®

Pantone is by far the most important company worldwide when it comes to standardized colors, and it is possible to download, install and convert many of their color palettes for free, as has been described in detail on the Scribus Wiki.

#### HKS®

In Germany and some of its neighbouring countries, the “HKS” colors are ubiquitous. Traditionally, HKS comes in four flavors: K, N, Z, and E. The meaning of those letters is as follows:

- K = Kunstdruck (Coated Paper)
- N = Naturpapier (Uncoated Paper)
- Z = Zeitungsdruck (Newspaper Printing)
- E = Endlosdruck (Continuous Printing)

If you don’t have access to a HKS swatch file from another program, not everything is lost. First, HKS K is included in the J&S K palette, although there are minor differences between HKS and J&S K. If you need other flavors, you will find hundreds of online resources for HKS colors, because many German companies (most of them commercial printers) provide a list of HKS Klassik colors on their websites. Beware, though, that not all of these resources are equally reliable. Some are approximations, while others exactly reproduce HKS’s values. If you are using Scribus 1.5.x or later, you should search for PDF files that contain the whole palette(s) in one file. Importing or opening the PDF will give you all HKS colours, provided they have been stored correctly.

To make sure that you are actually working with HKS spot colors, you should check in the Edit > Fills dialog (Edit > Colors in 1.4.x). Only the spot color indicator will guarantee that you are actually working with HKS spot colors.

#### Other Vendors

We are not aware of any legal resource of freely available color palettes or PS/PDF charts for the colors from other vendors aside from those that are being shipped with commercial software. If you are aware of one, please don’t hesitate to inform the Scribus Team via the developer mailing list.