Which Pantone Metallic was used when one made the .afdesign file earlier?

[William Overington]

Something that I noticed. Maybe I just don't know how to do it.

I know that Pantone Metallics are meant to be used with special inks on coated paper or coated card.

Nevertheless I have used a Pantone Metallic in Affinity Designer to try to give an impression of gold text on a greetings card that I hope to get made using the Papier facility. That will use CMYK printing on uncoated card from a jpg file exported from Affinity Designer, so not metallic printing. Notwithstanding using the swatch in an unconventional way, the result on screen looks good.

I used the Pantone Metallic 8644 that is the colour noted on a card design on page 8 of another thread.

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/138654-artwork-for-greetings-cards/page/8/

The matter that I am writing about here is that when I load into Affinity Designer a .afdesign file made previously, there does not seem to be a way to find that the Pantone metallic is number 8644.

I happen to know it is because I used the one documented in an illustration on that page of the linked forum thread.

So, if loading a .afdesign file done previously, can one find out, from the content of the file, which particular Pantone colour was used please? I also tested it with a Pantone CMYK coated colour too.

William

 

[v_kyr]

Hmm, the Affinity online help here only tells ...

Quote

Accessing PANTONE® Colors

PANTONE® Color palettes are available from the main Swatches panel, and will automatically become a global spot color in the document palette when applied. They are also available from the pop-up Swatches panel on the context toolbar when a shape, line, or stroke is selected.

To access PANTONE® Colors:

1. On the Swatches panel (or pop-up Swatches panel), from the category pop-up menu, select your preferred PANTONE palette.
2. To display the PANTONE® Color name and number, select the Swatches panel's Panel Preferences menu and choose Show as List.

 

[sfriedberg]

I may be wrong, but I think the answer is "no".  The Affinity suite has a very weak color palette mechanism compared to CorelDRAW, and very very weak (nearly nonexistent) prepress and separations support.  So in CD, I draw with any paletted Pantone, HKS, Trumatch, FOCOLTONE, TOYO, etc. color, and the object properties tell me it's colored PANTONE 114C (or whatever), not the RGB or CMYK approximation, and will highlight the appropriate entry in the color picker palette.  That's true whether I've set my document color model to RGB or CMYK, either way.  I've never gotten Affinity Designer to do that for me.

[thomaso]

5 hours ago, William Overington said:

when I load into Affinity Designer a .afdesign file made previously, there does not seem to be a way to find that the Pantone metallic is number 8644.

Not sure if I got you right. There is CMYK print, a JPG and their initial .afdesign document, right? Doesn't the object in AD which got initially the Pantone color assigned still report its color in the Colors Panel if you select the object? Respectively, what do you want to detect if you know already the number you are looking for is 8644?

 

[lacerto]

On 11/6/2021 at 11:27 PM, William Overington said:

So, if loading a .afdesign file done previously, can one find out, from the content of the file, which particular Pantone colour was used please? I also tested it with a Pantone CMYK coated colour too

In a Designer file an originally used Pantone color would show both in the document palette and in the Color panel so that when you have an object with spot color assignment, following should be shown:

 

This information is not lost when you save and re-open your Designer files. Spot color assignments would be shown on the Color panel also when you open PDF files that have spot color plates.

[William Overington]

Thank you.

I was looking at the Swatches panel, as that was where I had added the Pantone colour.

It did not occur to me to look at the Colour panel.

It seems obvious now, a sort of Egg of Columbus thing, obvious once one knows, seemingly impossible before.

William

 

[William Overington]

6 hours ago, thomaso said:

Not sure if I got you right. There is CMYK print, a JPG and their initial .afdesign document, right? Doesn't the object in AD which got initially the Pantone color assigned still report its color in the Colors Panel if you select the object? Respectively, what do you want to detect if you know already the number you are looking for is 8644?

 

I knew that it is 8644 in this particular case, I was just wondering for the general case, whether I would need to make a note in an accompanying text file.

William

 

[walt.farrell]

4 hours ago, William Overington said:

I was just wondering for the general case, whether I would need to make a note in an accompanying text file.

I just re-open the .afdesign file, select the object, and look in the Color panel (or, for text, click on the Fill well in the Context Toolbar). If it has a Pantone Color, it is clearly shown there.

[thomaso]

4 hours ago, William Overington said:

a note in an accompanying text file

If you add a text file anyway why not mentioning as many (relevant) information as possible?

Also, a PDF may be useful aside your Affinity file, possibly with text converted to curves. Currently PDF is quite likely the more common file type, in particular for archiving. (PDF/X, respectively PDF/A (not available for Affinity export)).

[William Overington]

1 hour ago, thomaso said:

If you add a text file anyway why not mentioning as many (relevant) information as possible?

Also, a PDF may be useful aside your Affinity file, possibly with text converted to curves. Currently PDF is quite likely the more common file type, in particular for archiving. (PDF/X, respectively PDF/A (not available for Affinity export)).

Actually, I don't usually add a text file when I am making a design.

Previously, when making fonts I have made a text file using WordPad. This has been helpful when continuing some time - maybe days or weeks - later so as to refresh my mind as o what has already been done and what still needs to be done.

Perhaps a good idea would be if producing a design in Affinity Designer with a file name placeholder.afdesign to also produce an Affinity Publisher file with file name placeholder_backstory.afpub with notes in it.

The name placeholder_backstory.afpub being used rather than placeholder.afpub to avoid file name clashes if a PDF document is exported from each of them.

William

.

 

 

 

[Alfred]

3 hours ago, William Overington said:

Previously, when making fonts I have made a text file using WordPad. This has been helpful when continuing some time - maybe days or weeks - later so as to refresh my mind as o what has already been done and what still needs to be done.

I know you use High-Logic FontCreator. Doesn’t your version have a ‘User notes’ toolbar? I think it’s been included for the past seven or eight years.

[William Overington]

25 minutes ago, Alfred said:

I know you use High-Logic FontCreator. Doesn’t your version have a ‘User notes’ toolbar? I think it’s been included for the past seven or eight years.

I only have version 8, which is quite old now. However, thus far it does what I need for fontmaking, though I have rather lost touch with later developments of FontCreator and applying recently added facilities. I tend these days to make fonts for the glyphs for novel characters that I have devised for my research. The only OpenType features that I regularly use are the liga table as used for ligatures - though I do not usually use liga for existing ligatures - and COLR/CPAL colour font capability. 

If the facility for user notes is included in FontCreator version 8 then I have not noticed it.

As you possibly know my main interests include my research on communication through the language barrier, including in particular, though by no means exclusively, my localizable sentences invention - and trying to become an artist. Though I do find other things of interest too.

And then there is the writing.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/

William

 

 

[Alfred]

1 hour ago, William Overington said:

If the facility for user notes is included in FontCreator version 8 then I have not noticed it.

Take a look here:

Re: Saving preview sample text in the project file

[William Overington]

32 minutes ago, Alfred said:

Take a look here:

Re: Saving preview sample text in the project file

Following through to the links from those posts I do not remember doing them.

https://forum.high-logic.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=4519

I have just found the whole thread and I am starting to explore.

This was in the days of an old Windows xp machine that broke.

I wonder what can be recovered from the High-Logic forum.

Only just over eight years ago and it needs archaeology!

William

 

 

[Ali]

LOL, @William Overington! Another Groundhog Day ...

[Alfred]

49 minutes ago, Ali said:

LOL, @William Overington! Another Groundhog Day ...

Punxsutawney Will?

[Alfred]

Confused, Ali? I thought you might understand the reference!

Groundhog Day -> Punxsutawney Phil -> Punxsutawney Will[iam]

[Ali]

Got it now.

[William Overington]

Actually I think that there is enough information on that High-Logic web page to which i linked to enable reconstruction of those colour font experiments, given a couple of items of background information.

The first image is a colourized version of my Galiileo Lettering font.

Then there are the glyphs that are like the teletext graphic from the lowercase letter 'e'.

I expect that I was making that font so as to produce a reproduction as best I remember it of my Colour Check graphic that appeared on page 786 of viewdata (in the days before it was called Prestel). I saw it in September 1977 but I do not know how long after that it was included. I wonder if that is archived anywhere and could be recovered. The graphic had a large red block composed of 'e' graphics towards upper left as viewed, a large green block of 'e' graphics towards upper right and a large block of blue 'e' graphics lower middle, with the three blocks overlapping, so as to have blocks of yellow, magenta, cyan, white. The Hold graphics character was used at the left of each row of characters. All displayed colourfully glowing on a black background.

Then there are colourized versions of the arabesque designs from my Quest text font, those designs based on some from the sixteenth century.

Then there are the four for monitoring instrumentation, designs based on the Petra Sancta system. I am thinking that three extra ones for values too low could be added, cyan, blue, purple and just use the three original designs that are not green for values too high.

William

 

[walt.farrell]

On 11/6/2021 at 5:27 PM, William Overington said:

I used the Pantone Metallic 8644 that is the colour noted on a card design on page 8 of another thread.

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/138654-artwork-for-greetings-cards/page/8/

Rather than pointing us at a page, please (in the future) point us to the post. You should see a "..." icon on the post. If you click it, one of the options is Share, which will give you the URL of that exact post, which you can copy and paste.

[Alfred]

40 minutes ago, William Overington said:

viewdata (in the days before it was called Prestel)

Celebrating the Viewdata Revolution.

[William Overington]

1 hour ago, walt.farrell said:

Rather than pointing us at a page, please (in the future) point us to the post. You should see a "..." icon on the post. If you click it, one of the options is Share, which will give you the URL of that exact post, which you can copy and paste.

The future has arrived.

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/138654-artwork-for-greetings-cards/&do=findComment&comment=796743

William

 

[walt.farrell]

Thanks, William.

Out of curiosity, did my hint about selecting an object in the .afdesign file and looking at the Color panel help? (I would test that myself, but you didn't provide the .afdesign version.)

[William Overington]

19 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

Thanks, William.

Out of curiosity, did my hint about selecting an object in the .afdesign file and looking at the Color panel help? (I would test that myself, but you didn't provide the .afdesign version.)

Yes, thank you.

William