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 -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: [email protected] Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentliberation.org/www/discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
