[CREATE] colour lists; in Oyranos?

[Kai-Uwe Behrmann]

Hi,

small intro:
my name is Kai-Uwe Behrmann. I work on gtk1 CinePaint and Oyranos, a 
colour management library. <www.cinepaint.org> <www.oyranos.org>

The matter I like to write about is colour lists naming and 
communication. You described some internal formats on the web site. All 
they are ascii based. Well, I like the idea of human readable files.

Anyway the ICC has allready included a way to describe such colour patches 
in an ICC profile. See <www.color.org> for the spec. A binary format.

I interprete such files in ICC Examin, my GPL licensed ICC profile viewer, 
and use them for color space visualisations in CinePaint. A small plug-in 
writes in CinePaint the colour list profiles. So the code is in place.

the pro about ascii (xml profiles - maybe like in Microsoft Longhorn):
o they is human readable
o easy editable
o pretty good parsing

the pro for binary (ICC profiles):
o small
o fast
o established format in the colour industry

What I offer is to add an colour list API into Oyranos to adress the 
matter. This means reading and writing patches and collections in the ICC 
way (ICC1V42.pdf Section 10.14 namedColor2Type):

o colour space identifer ("Rgb")
o identifer; 4 chars
o number of patches
o number of device channels - should be the same like the colour space 
  channels
o common prefix
o common suffix
  - first name
  - first colours CIELab as 16-bit integer
  - first colours Device channels as 16-bit integer

  - next colour
  ...

You can then write named colour lists as ICC profiles, and write some 
ascii back from an ICC ncl2 Profile.

What does you think about this idea? Would you make usage from?

regards
Kai-Uwe Behrmann
                                + development for color management 
                                + imaging / panoramas
                                + email: ku.b at gmx.de
                                + http://www.behrmann.name