[CREATE] Color swatches

[Cyrille Berger]

Hello,

On Sunday 06 April 2008, Olivier BERTEN wrote:
> 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.
Nice.

> I'm pretty new to python programming 
> so my code is probably not optimal...
I can't help you :) I can't parse python :/

> Color swatch draft
> <http://create.freedesktop.org/wiki/index.php/Swatches_-_colour_file_format
>/Draft>
>
> The name and space attributes shouldn't be mandatory. 
I have no problem with name beeing optional. But I don't agree for space.

> 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%).
I disagree, that would mean the color would look different when it is used. 
For RGB, we can decide that it is default for sRGB. And beside what would 
mean  C=10% M=20% Y=30% K% without indication of the space ?

> 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,
> ...)
Yes this is still under consideration. Wether to add some 'simple' home made 
metadata, or use XMP, or use an other RDF schema, or allow anything.

> and swatch-wide settings ("all rgb values are in Adobe1998 color 
> space", "all color names start with 'PANTONE' and end with 'C'", ...).
I am not sure about the use of this ? Since the file is not really intended 
for being written by hand by an human, I can only see compression, but then I 
think bzip2 or zip will do a better job. And I don't like that change, since 
it makes the parsing more complicated.

-- 
Cyrille Berger