Converting Pantone colors to RGB? [closed]

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Is it possible to connvert Pantone colors to RGB? From what I can tell you would need a lookup table of some sort. With thousands and thousands of colors I would never want to maintain this myself so does anybody know of an api?

We use Java so a Java api would work best.

Answer 1

Pantone does provide RGB values for the colors in their database, but they maintain that the database (of colors, and of their RGB mappings) is solely their intellectual property. Licensing information may be available at:

http://www.pantone.com/pages/partners/become_a_licensee.aspx

Answer 2

This is generally not possible, as a Pantone color is defined colorimetrically under specific lighting conditions, while RBG colors are at the mercy of the display gamut and calibration.

In other words, a specific RGB color will display differently depending on the color space (sRGB, AdobeRGB, etc) and also on the calibration and color gamut of the monitor on which it's displayed. There's a whole industry around monitor calibration tools and software, but only graphics and photography professionals generally use calibration.

In short, if you (or anybody) were to come up with a mapping table, it would be valid only for a specific computer and monitor combination, and would be visibly incorrect on many, if not most, other monitors.