Re: [documentliberation-discuss] Library for colour palette formats?

On Monday, October 06, 2014 03:48:14 PM David Tardon wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Mon, Oct 06, 2014 at 02:07:37PM +0200, Inge Wallin wrote:
> > On Monday, October 06, 2014 06:12:29 AM Christoph Schäfer wrote:
> > > 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
> >
> > The paint program Krita, which is part of the Calligra suite, supports all
> > of these color models (afaik) and many many more. This is supported by
> > the Pigment library that you can look at here:
> > http://quickgit.kde.org/?p=calligra.git&a=tree&h=6a06ba79d7ab5593931a29c98
f21b98259b8ec6d&hb=a73d1228e5fbebdf8cb833c480a26ec22c026777&f=libs%2Fpigme
> > nt
> >
> > Some documentation can be found here.
> > https://community.kde.org/Calligra/Libs/Pigment
> >
> > Please use and improve this and don't create an incompatible new library.
>
> Pigment is entirely irrelevant here, because the question was about parsing
> various color pallete file formats, not color space transformations. AFAICS
> Pigment does not do that.

This shows a lack of forward-thinking. Pigment does not merely store the color spaces or 
transform them, there is naturally also code to load and store it from files. Tbh I am not 
sure if that code is in Krita or in pigment itself but rest assured that there is such code 
somewhere in Calligra.

> Also:
>
> 1. Pigment is a part of Calligra. AFAICS it cannot even be built separately
>    -> not usable for other projects.

This is true. But if the choice is to look at Pigment and extract it from Calligra or something 
new from scratch I would think the choice to be easy.

> 2. Pigment depends on Qt -> not really usable for projects that are not
>    already built using Qt (especially for multiplatform ones -- noone is
>    going to bundle Qt in Windows and OS X builds just as a dependency for
>    an external library).

This is also true. But again, it would be far far easier to transform Pigment into Qt-free 
code and add a Qt wrapper to it wherever needed than to write it from scratch. The Qt 
wrappers could be kept inside Calligra too if nobody else wants it, or they could be 
provided by a part of the new stand-alone Pigment release.

I think the best way forward is to contact the Krita people who maintain Pigment and start 
a discussion with them. The place to do that is probably the Krita mailinglist which is called 
kimageshop@kde.org[1] for historical reasons.

        -Inge


--------
[1] mailto:kimageshop@kde.org

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