Hi, I would like to ask for the development team's consideration for implementing the OpenPalette format for their palettes.

OpenPalette is really hoping for a medium with interoperability and flexibility. The file format is XML-based; there's a DTD and XSD already written and ready for business. There's a lot more information at the site (http://openpalette.uk.to), if you are willing to look into it. You can also download a PDF concerning OpenPalette here.

Thanks; if you have any questions, I'm ready to answer.

It would seem straightforward enough to have GIMP load or save your OpenPalette files -- a plug-in could easily be written or the built-in function enhanced to offer the option. It would be beneficial to have a common format for palettes shared between different editing programs; however, adoption as a replacement for the current palette file format would up to others.

The format seems rather wasteful of filespace, with the tags using about three times the space of the data; but I guess that's the nature of XML (and I am trying to get over decades of being a bit-pincher).

I feel it is a requirement that your format support some way of declaring the palette's "license", which would typically be a couple of dozen lines in length. Owing to the length, perhaps a separate tag should be allowed for. The same could be said about a "comment" field, offering multiple lines of descriptive commentary could prove useful.

I would assume that your format will eventually have the "type" attributes for the "value" element expanded to include more than just the 24-bit RGB colorspace.

Hi,

On Thu, 2007-11-22 at 20:18 -0800, Sandman wrote:

Hi, I would like to ask for the development team's consideration for implementing the OpenPalette format for their palettes.

The format seems to be rather limited and doesn't cover the needs of modern graphics applications. On the Create mailing-list people have been discussing an open format for color swatches over the last few weeks. I suggest that you join the Create mailing-list and contribute to that discussion.

We can certainly add code to import the OpenPalette format. We already have code for five different formats in GIMP and it wouldn't hurt to add yet another one to this list. So if you want to contribute that code, that would be appreciated. GIMP also offers the infrastructure that allows you to write a plug-in or script that exports palettes to the OpenPalette format.

Sven

On Thursday 22 November 2007 20:18:14 Sandman wrote:

Hi, I would like to ask for the development team's consideration for implementing the OpenPalette format for their palettes.

OpenPalette is really hoping for a medium with interoperability and flexibility. The file format is XML-based; there's a DTD and XSD already written and ready for business. There's a lot more information at the site (http://openpalette.uk.to), if you are willing to look into it. You can also download a PDF concerning OpenPalette here.

Thanks; if you have any questions, I'm ready to answer.

My first concern is that it does not appear to have a way to specify the actual color. That is it allows the "color" to be specified by a hex value that appears to be limited to FFFFFF and/or an RGB value which appears to be limited to 255,255,255 which is really equal to FFFFFF. But what do these values mean?

On the Usage page there is an example of a color named "red" that has an RGB value of 255,0,0. Depending on the color space this could be any number of actual real world colors. For example, this red would be significantly different if the color space is sRGB as compared to ProPhotoRGB or my monitors native color space or what would be printed on my printer. So which red are we talking about? There needs to be a way to specify colors in a way that is not ambiguous and this format as far as I was able to determine does not do that. Since I was not able to find the PDF document perhaps I am missing something?

Open source software that uses this typs of data is now, or is in the process of becomming, color management aware and should be able to deal with color being specified using an unambigous format such as specifying the CIE Lab or CIE XYZ value of the desired color. Another way to do this would be to specify both a colorspace such as sRGB, BetaRGB or ProPhotoRGB along with the RGB or CMY(K) values of the color.

Also what about other color space types such other than RGB such as CMY(K)? And what about other representations such as floating point or 16 bit or 32 bit channel values?

Hal