[CREATE] What is a "swatch" ?

[Craig Bradney]

On Friday 28 September 2007 18:51:30 Cyrille Berger wrote:
> On Friday 28 September 2007, Jon A. Cruz wrote:
> > To try to get some idea of various platforms needs, I thought it
> > might be good to separately address the definition of "swatch".
> >
> >
> > For Inkscape's needs, we'd like to at least have linear and radial
> > gradients. If reasonable, patterns would be very good too. For
> > colors, we need base sRGB values, and icc specified colors. Having an
> > sRGB fallback is needed.
>
> What's a reasonable pattern ? And I also wonder what's differentiate
> between a linear and radial gradients as far as a swatch file format is
> concerned ?
>
> Anyway for Krita, it's also color, gradients and patterns (and brush ?). In
> gradients we currently use the same file format as the Gimp which have more
> features than SVG gradient (linear, curved, sine, sphere inc., sphere dec.
> interpolations in RGB and HSV ).
>
> About pattern, the annoyance is that is usually a bitmap file, and it's
> allways a little bit annoying to embed a bitmap file in XML. And having
> separate file is less convenient when you want to exchange your file.


Do we have to confuse it all and have one single file to determine all of 
these things?

Colors
Patterns
Gradients

Various formats exist for those, but the idea of the colour format was to 
define colours.. 

Now.. as for "Gold" etc.. "gold" (* in terms of printing at least* ) still 
needs a representation rgb or cmyk (to convert) for screen use. Gold ends up 
being printed from a spot colour defined by name.. it could be R=255, G=0,B=0 
on screen for all that matters.

Craig