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Doris Brown, Pantone’s marketing head, I learned that InDesign CS2 shipped with Pantone color specifications that were out of date not long after CS2 was released.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 [1] Pantone. As far as I know, the change was not rectified in future copies of InDesign CS2. Now that [2] 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 [3] a fix available at the Pantone website.

[4] 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 [5] 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.