[Scribus] Color swatches - Legal and technical issues

[Christoph Schäfer]

Am Montag, 29. Januar 2007 00:11 schrieb Olivier BERTEN:
> Hi!
>
> I've been looking around about color swatches in Scribus these last days
> and I happen to ask myself some questions.
>
> Legal issues :
> - Is it ok to use proprietary swatches (read Pantone) outside of the
> application it's distributed with?

As long as you have obtained a licence (a demo licence should suffice), why 
not? After all, it's just a list with names :)

> - Is it ok to convert these swatches into another format?

As long you do it for your own purposes, why not?

>
> Concretely: you can install a demo version of InDesign or QuarkXPress,
> which are distributed with a dozen of proprietary swatches. The XPress 7
> ones are in xml format so it would be easy to import and the Adobe Color
> Book binary format is quite easy to read. So the question is now: is it
> conceivable to include these formats into the colour import function?

Can you please check the licences? If you think you can achieve anything, did 
you also have a look at Corel's palette files (*.cpl)?

>
> I'm trying to make a convertor for acb (CS2 and CS3) to sla:
> http://www.olivierberten.info/scribus/#acb2sla
> It's not yet fully functionnal since the L*a*b data are given as-is...
> and Scribus doesn't yet support it...
> (if someone has a Lab2sRGB convert script in PHP, it would be helpful...
> I'm not very good at PHP maths...)
>
> Technical issues
> - I've seen L*a*b support is in project
> <http://wiki.scribus.net/index.php/Colour_Requirements> but it's not on
> the roadmap. It would be quite useful for the spot colours since all
> software now use the L*a*b data in their spot colour lists...
> - The current swatch format is quite basic and doesn't include "spot"
> info (I've started the page
> <http://wiki.scribus.net/index.php/New_Colours_Format> following the
> 1.3.6 stage of the roadmap)
> - By default, the colour list is alphabetically sorted. Is it possible
> to disable this? In some swatches, the colour order is quite significant...

Can you check the bug tracker if there's already a feature request. In case it 
isn't, can you file one?

>
> Olivier

Olivier, if I may, I strongly encourage you to explore the technical 
opportunities, as your approach sounds very interesting to me. Do you think 
it would be possible to do this in Python? All major FOSS graphics apps 
support Python, and it'd be wonderful if there was a Python script available 
to import licenced palettes.

Cheers!

Christoph