[CREATE] Color swatches

[Olivier BERTEN]

Hello!


It's been a while now that I've been analyzing color swatches in 
different software. Here is the result of my work: 
http://www.selapa.net/couleurs/fileformats.php (it's an update of 
http://wiki.scribus.net/index.php/Talk:New_Colours_Format with another 
presentation). If someone has informations about other formats or 
precisions about these ones, I'd be happy to add it to the list...


I also started writing a conversion script (attached). For now, it can 
only read pal (riff), aco, act, acb (adobe and autocad unencrypted 
only), ase, acf, bcf, clr (colors only), cpl, qcl, bcs, cs. No write 
function is there yet. It returns a dictionary with the content of the 
swatch. All values are kept as in the original file, that's why there's 
a 'orig' field in the dictionary. I'm pretty new to python programming 
so my code is probably not optimal...


Now some thoughts about color swatches in general and about the CREATE 
draft:


Registration color

IMHO, this shouldn't come in a color swatch file. It's a "system" color, 
just the opposite of 'None'. It depends of the colors used in the 
document. If you're using only cyan in your document, registration will 
be 100% cyan. If your document contains only magenta and yellow, 
registration will be red. And if you have spot colors, registration 
won't be C=100% M=100% Y=100% K=100%. In other words, registration can't 
be defined out of the document's context. Registration should just be 
added in the software's color list for any press work.


Color swatch draft 
<http://create.freedesktop.org/wiki/index.php/Swatches_-_colour_file_format/Draft>

The name and space attributes shouldn't be mandatory. A color doesn't 
need a name to come into a palette and many palettes are just a 
arbitrary "geometrical" division of the possibilities of color model. 
When you have #003399 in a palette, it's not because it looks like 
anything in real life, it's just because its neighbors are #003366 and 
#0033CC. It just shows different possibilities of RGB, whether you're 
using sRGB or AdobeRGB doesn't matter. The same applies to "Black 20%" 
(or C=10% M=20% Y=30% K%). There are a lot of such palettes where 
neither the name or the color space have any importance. By the way, Lab 
and XYZ don't need any color space since these are device-independant 
models.

That model also lacks swatch informations (name, copyright, license, 
...) and swatch-wide settings ("all rgb values are in Adobe1998 color 
space", "all color names start with 'PANTONE' and end with 'C'", ...).




Olivier

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