GPL is nice and straight forward, but cannot handle anything more complicated than 8bit sRGB.
We need a format that can...
- Handle other spaces than (s)RGB
- Handle HDR values (2.0, 0.5 ,3.4)
- Embed ICC profiles.
We have two options:
- Swatchbooker: http://www.selapa.net/swatchbooker/
- Cobble together our own format from KoColor xml nodes and an embedded iccprofile somehow.
Swatchbooker's big disadvantage is that there's no clear specification. There's a little outline on the website, but it's not quite right...
For example, according to the website, I should be able to specify the following:
<color usage="spot">
<metadata>
<dc:identifier>G5</dc:identifier>
<dc:title>Gray 50%</dc:title>
</metadata>
<values model="Lab">50 0 0</values>
<values model="GRAY">0.5<values>
<values model="sRGB">0.5 0.5 0.5</values>
</color>And it would be desirable to have such a thing: it allows fall back mechanisms for programs without color management.
But none of the existing swatchbooker files in the wild have this setup, probably because swatchbooker itself wasn't that flexible yet? At the least, the people at http://freecolour.org/ didn't seem to realise that identifier and title are different beasts.
Swatchbooker's other disadvantage is of course that it doesn't run on modern distros anymore, meaning we can't really test anything.
Other Issues
- I also mentioned this in the palette docker task. but we should come up with a mechanism for differentiating and differently using spot colors as opposed to non-spot colors.
- How to make use of localised strings inside the swatchbook?
- Swatchbooker has groups, should we spent some time on making the docker able to display these groups nicely?