spotxcolor Package

LaTeX: Modern Spot Color Support for the xcolor package

This package provides robust spot color (e.g., DIC, PANTONE) support for the xcolor package across all major TeX engines. It resolves structural PDF issues found in the legacy spotcolor package and provides an explicit fallback mechanism for dvipdfmx (which is not fully supported by the colorspace package).

• Supported major drivers: pdftex, luatex, dvipdfmx (including ptex/uptex), xetex

Requirements

• A modern TeX Live environment (requires an up-to-date expl3/l3kernel)
• xcolor and iftex packages

Installation

Copy spotxcolor.sty to your local TeX tree: $TEXMF/tex/latex/spotxcolor/

Usage

Load the spotxcolor package. It will automatically load xcolor and detect your engine driver.

\usepackage{spotxcolor}

% \definespotcolor{<latex-name>}{<pdf-name>}{<cmyk-values>}
\definespotcolor{DIC161}{DIC 161s*}{0, 0.64, 1, 0}

\begin{document}
\sffamily\bfseries
% Native xcolor interface (CMYK fallback safely applied in dvipdfmx)
\textcolor{DIC161}{This is DIC 161}

% Explicit spot color interface (Force true spot color in dvipdfmx)
\SpotColor{DIC161}{1.0}
This is 100% DIC 161
\end{document}

Note for (u)pLaTeX users

If you compile your document with platex or uplatex and generate a PDF via dvipdfmx, you must specify the dvipdfmx driver option globally in your document class (e.g., \documentclass[dvipdfmx]{article}). Otherwise, modern expl3 and xcolor will default to the dvips driver, and the spot colors will not be generated correctly.

Backward Compatibility

You can easily reuse your existing code and color dictionaries written for the legacy spotcolor package. Commands like \AddSpotColor, \NewSpotColorSpace, and \SetPageColorSpace are perfectly emulated.

License

This package is licensed under the terms of the MIT License.

Munehiro Yamamoto https://github.com/munepi