Colour Picker

allowing colour sets to be uploaded to the dialogue box

I like that especially – it’s similar to what I currently do in !XP1ReDraw (which is the motivation behind this whole proposal) – I have simple text files (easily edited by the user) that you can drag and drop on the icon on the icon bar, to change the set of line patterns (or in principle, the hatchings, but currently there aren’t enough of those to need it) that correspond to the colours.

But for my purposes, a set of 24 to 32 swatches would suffice; as long as they were chosen to be easily distinguished it wouldn’t matter hugely what they were. I certainly wouldn’t want 32 shades of grey, or 32 reds!

If you’d find any of these options easy to implement – any chance of you doing something? :-) I’ve been increasingly thinking I might have to bite the bullet myself, and I don’t even have the DDE for C…

Steve invoked

Where’s Nemo when you want him?

I’ve been getting cross at politicians, mainly.

There’s at least one company

DON’T say the ‘P’ word. There’s a four-yearly print industry show called IPEX. At the last one I wandered over to THAT stand, and spoke for a while with the guy manning it. After about ten words he said “I remember you from last time”. We bitched about how no one cares about colour any more and lamented the passing of Hexachrome.

Anyway, yeah, without colour profiles you’re not going to get repeatable colour. But you know that already.

Mind you, Vantage shipped with a screen calibration program, and at one show someone came up and complained that V had got some artwork colour wrong – what had been printed didn’t match what was on the screen. He brought a floppy and the finished article, so I loaded his file. It was identical on my screen. “It didn’t look like that on mine” he said. “Did you calibrate your monitor?” I asked. “Oh yes” he said, “but then I turned the brightness down because I didn’t like it”.

Garbage in, garbage out.

Despite claims from the colour picker, RISC OS is RGB only. “CMYK” is just RGB in a silly hat. It is possible to do actual CMYK (or any other colourant set) but you need both the colour word as a proxy AND some other data structure to define the actual colourant levels. This is how the Truism colour engine worked in Vantage – what looked (naively) like 32bit RGB colours were actually unique colour identifiers, from which detailed multidimensional colour definitions could be found when necessary.

Associating names with RGB colours is simple, and there’s plenty of such swatch tables floating about. This little beauty is from 1993:

And no, those are “Puretone” colours, and not any other kind of colour, dammit.

I’ve been getting cross at politicians, mainly.

Wasted effort. It drops into the same class as a saying a friend uses regularly “Never argue with an idiot, they just drag you down to their level and beat you with experience”

Associating names with RGB colours is simple, and there’s plenty of such swatch tables floating about.

Which was rather my point, I’m sure half the ones you can find with a quick search in the Windows world¹ are re-inventions of others.

¹Your oh so favourite, misspelled cake company (somebody “et” a bit) like to claim the whole world but I suspect others may have been there first.

there’s plenty of such swatch tables floating about

Yes, I know. I just wish I was able to implement a colour picker that had one with maybe 30 colours, rather than the 16 we have. Sadly it’s beyond my capabilities (or at least, it’s at the top of an intimidating learning curve – not to mention £50 I can’t afford for a DDE).

[Amazing forum software]

Eh? Wrong thread? What this thread is about is the Colour Picker.

Another colour picker idea: as well as RGB, CMYK, HSV have a “Recent” option which switches to a swatch of the last 32 colours you’ve picked. Could be saved between reboots via !Boot.Choices perhaps? This would make it easy to use the same colours in different applications. Perhaps option to pin colours you particularly like? Or a method so that a user can grab a colour from an arbitrary screen location, or for applications to allow a colour to be copied to the “Recent” list.

have a “Recent” option

Better to call it old, to be consistent with StrongED’s Search and Replace. Every kind of option requiring textual input should have this as standard. Grabbing colours from the screen should also have it. This should be a feature of all colour pickers. Openbox as used in Raspbian does.