pantone colours

[frightful]

Hi
I have for many years, been using Macromedia's Suite which includes all the plugins for Pantone colours. Over the years I have added many ranges to these so have much more than the basic set.
The files have extensions of .acf and .bcf
Since I bought Xara I very rarely use anything else because as time goes by I learn how Xara often does the same jobs but easier. ( still learning )
Is there any way that I can get xara to recognise these extensions in order to put them into the palettes folder and therefore into the colour gallery.

I have Xara PGD 2013 and WD7 Premium

As I am in my second childhood and have to buy my own toys I don't really want to splash out on the Pro version which does include some PMS.
Thanks in advance for any help available

[gwpriester]

Why do you want to use the Pantone colors?

Unless there is a specific reason, e.g. you are designing a two color logo for a client that will be printed commercially using these colors, my advice is just visually try to replicate the colors that you see. If you still have Macromedia's suite, can you create a palette of colors you like, export the palette and being the palette into XPGD? If you export the colors as a bitmap, you can use the Color Picker (the eyedropper tool) to sample the colors.

[graphicsfactory]

I was a long time Freehand User. I created a lot of my own pallets. At the time, it was efficient. Now, using Xara Designer Pro, it's so easy just to create the colors on the fly. I agree with Gary. I work almost exclusively in spot colors, but rarely use the Pantone pallets. I usually create the color I wan't, and name it similarly. Xara seems to only recognize it's native pallet, *.jcw and pallets with *.pal extension. I have in the past used 3rd party programs to convert pallets and open in Xara, but it just didn't seem to be worth the effort. You may try to create a document in Freehand with as many objects as colors you want to create a pallet for. Then fill each object with the extra Pantone colors. Export the file as an Illustrator file. Open the file in Xara. The colors should retain their names. Save that as a Xara file. When you want to use the colors, open that file, find the color, copy the object and paste in your working document. You don't need to keep the object, delete it. The color will remain as a "used color" that you can apply, even after the object was deleted.

[frightful]

Thanks fellas
Thanks for the suggestions. I have already done what is obviously the long way around and shall make more use of Xara's naming facilities.
Sometimes I am tempted back to Freehand, which I have used since it was an Aldus prog. but I know that Xara is going to win out in the long term so it makes sense to keep learning.
Luckily for me I am retired so it doesn't have the importance it once had :-)
Great Forum

[gwpriester]

Macromedia is pretty much retired too, since it was acquired by Adobe.

We used to have our office just down the street from Macromedia in SOMA in San Francisco.