Color library find field finds only one color!

Question

Am I missing some little trick here? When I try to type a Pantone color number into my Pantone library finder field I get one color all the time: Pantone 108 M! Is there key combo for this field?
Is this just as bad as Photoshop's "type in a Color number' suggestion while opening a color menu( and there is no finder field to type into)?
Help! This is making me crazy....
Frank

Answer 1

Prefixing the search string with a space is probably the best thing to do.
While you're probably thinking of it as a numerical search, it's not. It's a
text search.
What the search command does is first look for a swatch starting with the characters you type in. For example, if you type in "lo", it will first look for colors starting with "lo", like maybe Loden Green. But if it finds none, it will then look for the first swatch name
containing "lo", and will match to "Yellow".
Characters are concatenated into the search string if they occur within the double-click time. Otherwise it starts over with a new string.
When you type in numbers, the digits are just treated as characters, no differently than "lo" above.
Since the Pantone libraries are not sorted in numerical order, but semi-alphabetically, if you are searching for something like "613", it will find the substring match in Pantone 2613 before it will the one in Pantone 613. By typing in " 613", you prevent a match in 2613, etc. (By the way, it isn't true that all the 4-digit Pantone colors end in 5, although it is true that all the Pantone colors in the 1000's end in 5. The 2000's contain a lot of colors ending in 3 and 7. I think they kind of treat 4 digit colors almost like they had an implicit decimal point between the third and fourth digits, and tried to space them out evenly.)
The substring search is mainly meant to accomodate color book libraries, where a lot of colors have the same prefix, so that you don't have to type in "Pantone 418". It should probably be changed to do a
three-step search instead of a two-step search, first looking for the characters at the beginning of the swatch name, then if none is found looking for the characters at the beginning of a word (i.e., preceded by a space or punctuation), and only if no word match is found to look for an arbitrary substring match. Under these revised rules, "ye" would match "light yellow" in preference to "Bye Bye Blackbird", even though the latter comes earlier in the alphabet.