Roland Color System Library

ByGreg Aubin

One approach to achieving great saturated colors on a Roland printer is to use the Roland Color System Library. This is a specially designed collection of color that sign makers typically use. In order to use these colors users will need to print out charts or swatch books and load the pallette into their design software.

PRINTING THE CHART: First start by setting up Queue A for the material you want to make the chart for. While you can make a chart for all your media types – making one with a gloss calandered vinyl is most effective and the colors will be close enough for most needs. You can always make another for a different media following these instructions. Make sure your queue is set up to “Use Spot Colors” in the FILE FORMAT tab.

Once the queue is set up (there are many settings that will be grayed out – so set the queue before loading the charts) load the color chart or color selector. To do this: [MENU] Media-Color Chart Type-1; [MENU] Media-Color Selector. You will then print either or both of these. These will be your color outputs – what is shown to your customer – what is matched to.

DESIGNING WITH RCSL: To get these colors (pallette/swatches) into your design program is specific to design program: The latest version of Corel and FlexiSign have them loaded by default – search for color pallettes – Roland – Roland Color System Library.

Roland makes the swatches available here – RVW6: [Windows 10: C:\Program Files\VersaWorks\Swatch].  You can copy the appropriate pallette(s). In Illustrator, the swatch pallettes are stored [Windows 10: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Illustrator 2021\Presets\en_US\Swatches.] It may be helpful to create a folder here called “Roland” and place both the “Roland Color System Library.ai” and the “Roland VersaWorks.ai” pallette into this folder. Now the pallettes will be visable in the swatch floating pallette in Illustrator.

It should be noted that older versions of Corel and Illustrator may need some tweaking due to different locations on the computer. Search for the details to help you through. Older versions of RVW had the swatches stores at [C:\Program Files (x86)\Roland VersaWorks\Swatch]. There are too many variants of installs and versions to cover it all.