**Pantone** is a proprietary colour-matching system widely used to specify the exact tinctures of national flags for manufacture. A flag specification given in Pantone references a particular ink formula that can be reproduced consistently on any press, irrespective of the local CMYK conversion. Many national governments publish official Pantone codes for their flags, sometimes alongside CMYK, RGB and hexadecimal equivalents.
**Example**: The official specification for the flag of the United Kingdom gives Pantone 280C for the blue and Pantone 186C for the red.
**See also**: [cmyk](/glossary/cmyk/), [rgb](/glossary/rgb/), [hex](/glossary/hex/), [construction-sheet](/glossary/construction-sheet/)