Re: [libreoffice-design] "LibreColour" palettes for LibreOffice

Hi Christoph,

great to see more creative people here. Me as an usability expert and
the other regular team members are rather UX driven and do not focus
too much on visual aspects, so having you at the list (at least, maybe
also at our weekly hangout on Thursday) is very appreciated.

About the colors we actually have a todo item at
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Design/Whiteboards (look for
Palette) that references the ticket
https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=80196 with my
comments regarding the whole topic in comment 29.
The ordinary user likely wants to have only one palette with ~20 brand
colors (e.g. LibreOffice). Now it's easy to imagine that people do not
work for just LibreOffice but also Gnome (Tango), KDE (Breeze), Web
(HTML) etc. and need additional palettes. But it's hard to imagine how
to deal with the 545 (luckily named) colors from the Scribus palette.
So my proposal was/is to strip down what is not needed by the majority
of users and provide easy means to add own
(https://design.blog.documentfoundation.org/2016/11/11/additions-to-libreoffice/).

What is your position about the default set of palettes? Should we
limit the number of palettes, have also a manageable size in terms of
<50 colors (this is a very arbitrary number), postulate elaborated
color names?

Cheers,
Heiko

2016-11-16 8:35 GMT+01:00 "Christoph Schäfer" <christoph-schaefer@gmx.de>:
> Hi LibreOffice Design Team,
>
>
> I've joined this list after some back and forth with Mike Saunders.
>
>
> First of all, let me introduce myself. I'm a member of the Scribus Team and also a supporter of 
> the German non-profit organisation freieFarbe e.V. (www.freiefarbe.de; English: 
> www.freecolour.org). Apart from contributing to both projects, I'm also promoting Scribus and 
> other LibreGraphics projects in talks, discussions an hands-on demonstrations in Austria, Germany 
> and the German-speaking parts of Switzerland. My latest talks were held during the "swiss publish 
> days 2016" in Berne (CH). One was a general overview about LibreGraphics tools for graphics 
> professionals (which is the major audience of this conference), the other one was about 
> LibreOffice as a file converter, as well as tool to create office graphics that can actually be 
> printed at high resolutions or being further enhanced using a professional vector graphics 
> software like Illustrator or CorelDraw. This is one way to sell LibreOffice to graphics 
> professionals who most likely prefer MacOffice, since these are features that MS Office doesn't 
> provide. Moreover, MacOffice doesn't include MS Publisher or MS Visio, so MacOffice customers 
> still need LibreOffice to convert output from these programmes.
>
>
> Another selling point for LibreOffice arose out of a new development at freieFarbe / freeColour. 
> fF / fC will release version 2.0 of the "OpenColour Systems Collection" (OCSC). This is a 
> collection of colour palettes, mostly from commercial vendors. The collection isn't based on the 
> original colour values provided by these vendors, but on colorimetric measuring of their physical 
> colour references. The colour values themselves are stored as CIE L*a*b. OCSC v. 1.0 only 
> comprised SBZ palettes, a format that apart from SwatchBooker only the development version of 
> Scribus can read. In v. 2.0, however, we'll also include ASE files for Adobe programmes, as well 
> as plain text files. In addition we'll provide RGB versions in the formats GPL (GIMP, Inkscape, 
> Calligra Office, MyPaint), XML (Scribus 1.4.x) AND ... drumroll: SOC (LibreOffice, OpenOffice), 
> which means that more than 350 colour systems will be available to LibreOffice users under a CC 
> licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/legalcode). In other words, LibreOffice 
> users will be enabled to use real-world colour references (within the confines of the sRGB colour 
> space) like graphics professionals do. This is impossible with MS Office!
>
>
> And there's even more: fF / fC has produced "LibreColour" fans, i.e., fans based on the CIE L*a*b 
> colour model, which is an international free standard. There are two versions of the fan, one 
> using the original CIE L*a*b model. This one can be ignored by LibreOffice users, because LO 
> doesn't support L*a*b and doesn't have to. The purpose of this fan is to check screen colours in 
> L*a*b against a real word reference by using the "L" value as the guide, which isn't exactly 
> intuitive. More interesting is the CIE HLC fan, which provides 1032 colours using the HLC model. 
> Using this fan it's easy to find a real word colour via the "Hue" value and choose its equivalent 
> in a software like LibreOffice, even if it only supports the sRGB colour space. The physical fans 
> provide colour values in CIE L*a*b, CIE HLC, sRGB, CMYK (FOGRA39, coated paper), and HEX. 
> Currently the usage instructions included in the fans and the "shop" site 
> (http://dtpstudio.de/cielab/shop.php) are only available in German, but I'll translate them into 
> English soon. Please note that the fans' production was expensive. The retail price only covers 
> the costs.
>
>
> A Swiss colleague of mine, who is an expert in the field of cross-media publishing, thinks using 
> LibreOffice with the default colour palette set to CIE-HLC and the CIE HLC colour fan is the most 
> efficient way to work in a cross-media workflow that includes a sophisticated office suite, even 
> if the main office suite is still MS Office.
>
>
> Hence my request to consider replacing the current default colour palette with CIE-HLC.soc or at 
> least to add it to the palettes shipped with LibreOffice. Since an English version of the colour 
> fans isn't available yet, I suggest you consider my request to be a mid- to long-term suggestion. 
> There's no need to hurry, and if LibreOffice can be made the perfect office suite in cross-media 
> workflows only in version 6, so be it.
>
>
> Thanks for your patience; any feedback will be welcome.
>
>
> Kind regards,
> Christoph
>
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