Pantone Colors In InDesign CS2 Outdated

During a con­ver­sa­tion this month with Doris Brown, Pantone’s mar­ket­ing head, I learned that InDesign CS2 shipped with Pantone col­or spec­i­fi­ca­tions that were out of date not long after CS2 was released.

It seems that when InDesign CS2 start­ed ship­ping in May 2005, it used Pantone col­or spec­i­fi­ca­tions that were revised short­ly there­after by Pantone. As far as I know, the change was not rec­ti­fied in future copies of InDesign CS2. Now that CS3 has been released this will soon become obso­lete news, but many peo­ple will be using InDesign CS2 for some time to come so it’s a note­wor­thy defi­cien­cy. The good news is that there is a fix avail­able at the Pantone web­site.

Click this link to go direct­ly to the PANTONE COLOR BRIDGE® web­page and look for a link with the text, “To facil­i­tate use of the mod­i­fied CMYK screen tint per­cent­ages, free sup­port tools include a Digital Library down­load for use with pop­u­lar graph­ics appli­ca­tions and the PANTONE col­or bridge tuto­r­i­al.” You will need to be a myPANTONE mem­ber, but this is a free mem­ber­ship and can be cre­at­ed at the same web­page. Once you are logged in, you can down­load the PANTONE COLOR BRIDGE® appli­ca­tion that loads the Pantone col­or spec­i­fi­ca­tions to sev­er­al appli­ca­tions includ­ing InDesign 2.0–CS2, Illustrator 9–CS2, Photoshop 6–CS2, and some ver­sions of Freehand, CorelDRAW and QuarkXPress. QuarkXPress 6, by the way, did ship with the cor­rect Pantone col­or specifications.