[documentliberation-discuss] Library for colour palette formats?

Hello Document Liberators,


During a conference in Switzerland (http://swiss-publishing-week.ch/) I was asked by pre-press 
professionals if open source graphics programmes support "Pantone colours". As you may imagine, 
this required a complicated answer, because the question was already wrong. The correct question 
would've been: Do they support colour palette formats that contain the colour values and names, as 
well as the colour models (RGB, CMYK, spot, CIE L*a*b*). So the answer was that some programs 
support some formats, and some support the relevant colour models, but on Windows and *nix (except 
Mac OS X) you can use SwatchBooker to convert them (http://www.selapa.net/swatchbooker/) into the 
necessary formats. Since most of them use Mac OS that wasn't an encouraging answer to them.


Hence my idea to create a library which allows FLOSS programs to read these formats. Swatchbooker's 
author, Olivier Berten, has already documented most of them, so no re-engineering would be 
required. See: http://www.selapa.net/swatches/colors/fileformats.php A few less important formats 
are still missing, and I have sample files for them.


Since SwatchBooker is written Python and licensed under the GPL 3, it's not possible to reuse any 
code, but it's possible to look at the code (and Swatchbooker itself) to see what's required 
(colour management and CIE L*a*b* support, among others). I'm no coder myself, but since I'm 
talking about extremely simple formats, I think an experienced programmer might be able to create 
something useable in a very short timeframe.


Such a library would help users who want to switch to Free alternatives carry their Pantone, HKS, 
whatever, palettes over to the new software.


Anyone interested?



Kind regards,

Christoph

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