I have not been able to export or "save as" a graphic that has a fountain fill with specific Pantone spot colors and maintain those spot colors. I've tried .eps files and tif and all sorts of others, but when placing the graphic in another application (InDesign for instance) the fountain fill becomes CMYK. Other items in the graphic that are solid fills do maintain their spot color.

I am using Corel Draw 12

Diane Hoch

I'm not a spot color expert, but looking at what spot colors are vs. a fountain fill would explain the issue you are having. Fountain fills are made up of 0-1000 colors, spot colors are just single colors and the only thing you can vary is the tranparency unless you have a press which can handle 1000 colors :), so naturally a fountain fill made up of spot colors needs to be converted to CMYK to be printable. If you need to have a variation on a spot color then use interactive transparency.

In CorelDRAW X3, fountain fills and vector effects, such as bevels, drop shadows, transparency, mesh fills, and blends, can contain both process and spot colors. Even spot colors beneath vector effects are preserved rather than converted to process colors. You can import, export, and preview files that contain spot colors.

I don't know if that applies to CorelDRAW 12.

TIFF dose not support Pantone, while PDF, EPS and AI do.

Thanks for responding, Alfred. The problem with using the transparency tool is that it does convert spots to process. There's even a warning dialogue box that pops up telling you it will happen. The fountain fills I have created use only one Pantone color, which I bring from 100% of the color to 30% of the same color. When I look at print preview, I have exactly the separations that I want. The processing of the spot color happens when the graphic is exported. I keep thinking there's something that I'm supposed to "click on" or "click off" when I export, but I can't find anything in the export dialgue boxes.