[libreoffice-design] "LibreColour" palettes for LibreOffice

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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