> I get service, can they simply check for bad alignment and just charge for that If the alignment

You can often tell by how the tires are wearing and how the car drives. In theory the "correct" alignment for your car should cause your tires to wear evenly, and when you drive down the road on a flat, level, smooth road, and you let go of the wheel, it goes straight, or maybe drifts a hair to the right. It should not drift to the left.

If the side towards the center of the car is wearing faster then the outside, or other way around, it means the tires aren't "flat" on the ground.

The point of having your alignment done is to make sure the tires wear evenly, the car drives straight easily.

A car gets out of alignment by parts getting slightly bent. Even thick steel parts will slowly bend over time. And alignment is measured in 0.1degree increments. So just a hair off will make your car drive less smoothly. They measure it in 2 directions, plus the difference between the right and left side.

I had an old truck that was off 4 or 5 degrees. It still drove, just... you just had to keep your hand on the wheel to prevent it from turning right. It wanted to turn right, and went through tires quickly.

Well. We still talk about Paul being a vegan all these years later on random internet threads because of it.

So. Paul McCartney: 1, You: 0. You lost the game by playing it.

You’re not quite envisioning the setup right. These machines use buckets/barrels of ink at a time. You pour the ink in.

And you don’t have one for each Pantone, but you can have a few tanks that you basically set up per run. So in the example where the guy is talking DHL, you might load it with black, pms 2035c and pms 116c. (I assume those are the official colors). When you’re done printing out the million envelops, you dump out any extra ink, and clean the Pantone ink out of the press, and load it with the correct colors for the next job.

In the file, it stores "This item is pantone-1234", and lets the software using the file figure out what to do with it. So when it's rendered to screen, it uses a lookup to pick a good RGB color. When it's printed in CMYK it uses another. When you check it against what light it reflects, that's it's own set of rules about what it's "supposed to" look like. Fancy industrial printers have the ability to load specific inks for specific colors. So a press might support 4 colors, which you normally load CMYK. But let's say you're making a bunch of pamphlets for one company, which is black and white, but they want their logo on each page. You can load Black, and 3 other customs colors in instead. Some machines support something like 8 colors, just for this reason. Sometimes you need to load white ink because your printing on non-white materials. CMYK is just the most basic way of printing color.

The tricky part is defining “CMYK conversion”. A strict “technically correct” conversion tends to look terrible.

The way you do colors on a screen is by blending RG and B light. This is called additive color. CMYK adds pigments that block all but a specific band of light. There are some colors that are super hard to reproduce in one or the other. A nice dark four color black is impossible to reproduce on a monitor, not just because it’s hard to get the screen super-black, but it also doesn’t absorb light reflected off of it. It’s not of it’s surrounding, it’s it’s own light source.

So you have to consider a lot of things when you talk about CMYK colors… like how white is the paper you’re printing on. A super bleach white paper vs newspaper, which is very gray-ish. If you spray a light mist of say red spray paint on each, they will come out to different colors. So what do you use for your baseline for your RGB-CMYK conversion? Now are you doing this with natural light, incandescent lights (which are slightly yellow) or LED lights (which tend to blue).

Pantone dodges this whole problem, and says what the finished product should look like. It’s right when it looks like the swatch from the book. And ink manufacturers make inks that you can put a thin solid coat down and hit the target without question.