Scope & coverage

Answers to the three questions Jason raised on 23 July: which colors actually need Lab values, where the Pantone values can come from, and whether unused swatches can be stripped automatically. Every number here is measured from the live A2000 color master and two months of real Color Direct art — nothing is estimated.

1 · Which colors actually need a Lab value

A2000's color master carries every decoration method in one list, which is why the browser looks like 3,000+ colors. Its own ART_COLOR_TYPE already separates them — thread, flock, twill, rhinestone and foil follow their own RIP protocols and never need a Lab value.

colors in A2000

what the CMS browser lists today

digital-relevant

type INK or PMS

other methods

thread, flock, twill, foil… — filter these out

house inks actually used

distinct INK codes in 2 months of art

The working list is inks, not

Across every Color Direct file in the window, only distinct house ink codes appear — and of them (%) already have a canonical Lab value. Not one thread, flock, twill, rhinestone or foil color showed up in a single digital file, so the concern about specialty swatches is real for the browser but does not affect the standard: all valued rows in the CMS today are type INK.

Filtering the CMS art-colors browser to ART_COLOR_TYPE IN ('INK','PMS') removes rows (%) from view. That is a display filter — no color data is deleted.

The entire remaining backlog inks

House inks that appear in real Color Direct art but still have no canonical Lab value. This is the complete list — there is no long tail behind it.

INK006 and INK013 are the two pending the CMYK-vs-Lab decision; INK044 is covered by the values added on 21 July, which we still need the updated .ase to read; INK5109 is new.

2 · Pantone Lab values — already in hand

No multi-week sourcing effort is needed

The Adobe color book Tim supplied on 15 July — MV Sport PMS C.acb — carries Pantone+ Solid Coated colors with Lab values already in it. Adobe color books store Lab natively, so these are Pantone's own numbers, not a conversion. Parsed out, they cover of the distinct Pantone swatch names (%) that occur in real Color Direct art, and % of all Pantone swatch instances.

Applying them to the audit dropped ungradeable files from to — a % reduction — without anyone hand-entering a value.

Pantone colors in use

distinct names across the corpus

covered by the book

% of names

still missing

swatch instances total

The residual gap names

These are the only Pantone swatches we cannot value from the book. Most are not Solid Coated at all — uncoated (U) and TCX are different books, and a handful are recent Pantone additions that post-date this book.

3 · Stripping unused swatches

Measured on a random 140-file sample by comparing each file's swatch book against the spot colors actually painted into the artwork.

files already clean

of — nothing to purge

of swatches unused

of declared

swatches actually painted

across the sample

Yes — and it can be detected reliably

An .ai file is a PDF. The swatch panel lives in the file's XMP metadata, but a spot color that is actually painted must also appear as a /Separation or /DeviceN colorspace. Comparing the two sets identifies unused swatches exactly, with no guessing.

The check validates itself: on files whose designer already ran Illustrator's purge, the two counts agree precisely (19/19, 23/23, 24/24 observed). % of files are already clean — the waste is concentrated in a minority of files that carry Illustrator's untouched default palette (C=0 M=0 Y=0 K=100, CMYK Red, …), which alone accounts for of the swatch entries in the corpus.