How do I add PMS colors to swatches pallette

Question

I cannot for the life of me figure out how to add PMS colors to the swatches pallette? I'm running Win2000. Illustrator 10.
Thanks.

Answer 1

Terri Jo,
First off, each document has its own Swatches palette (also its own Symbol, Brush and Styles palettes.) So when you say "the" Swatches palette, it is not clear whether you are asking how to add Pantone colors to the Swatches palette belonging to the current document, or whether you are asking how to add Pantone colors to the Swatches palette that gets installed in new blank documents.
To do the former, you just open one of the Pantone Swatch libraries (from the Window menu), have a document open, and click on any Pantone swatch that you want to add to the Swatches palette of the current top open document. To add multiple swatches you can also shift-click to select a range of them, then use the Add to Swatches command on the library's palette menu.
To do the latter, you open as a regular document the Adobe Illustrator Startup_CMYK or Startup_RGB documents located in the Plug-ins folder. Then you do the same steps as above to copy swatches from the Pantone libraries to the startup document's Swatches palette. Then you save the startup document, and restart Illustrator.
The contents of all the palettes in the startup documents are copied into any new blank document that you create for that color mode. Since palette contents take up room in each file, just like regular art does, as long as you have the startup document open for editing you may want to take the opportunity to make your new files smaller, by removing from your startup documents any brushes, symbols or patterns that you never expect to use.
And finally, if what you want to do is set up a swatch library palette that contains your favorite Pantone colors, and which is available for
all documents, whether new blank ones or existing documents that were created earlier by yourself or even sent to you by someone else, what you should do is make a new blank document, install your favorite Pantone colors into it, and save that document with a name of your choice (like "Favorite PMS colors") in the Presets/Swatches folder. Then quit Illustrator, restart, open that document from the Swatch Libraries menu, and check the Persistent option in the library's palette menu. The Persistent option means that the library gets automatically loaded when you startup Illustrator. (Any random .ai document saved anywhere can be loaded as a library palette using the Other Library... command, but only documents that were located in the appropriate Presets folder when Illustrator was started will appear on the pullout menu and have a Persistent checkbox.)