The brand-name for a popular color matching system, designed specifically for digital prepress systems. Before digital halftoning, halftone screen percentages were only available in increments of 5%, which meant that each process color could only be specified to the nearest 5% (for example, you could specify 45% cyan, but not 49% cyan). This limited somewhat the number of colors that could be reproduced, since all process colors are created by overprinting each of the CMYK inks at various percentages. Digital prepress and desktop color systems allow colors to be specified in 1% increments, which opens up the range of colors that can be produced. The TRUMATCH Swatching System facilitates this, by including digital samples of over 2,000 process colors, each sample including the CMYK percentages required to reproduce it. In addition, the TRUMATCH system organizes each color by hue, or primary color component, then by saturation, and then by brightness (in other words, the HSB color model). The TRUMATCH system includes 50 hues, subdivided into 50 shades of each hue.
The TRUMATCH system is supported by most of the commonly-used page makeup program, such as QuarkXPress and PageMaker, as well as a variety of popular drawing programs. TRUMATCH swatches are also available in book form. (See also PANTONE and FOCOLTONE.)