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This is huge...
This opens another area of proprietary design which affects the fashion
industry.


On Nov 30, 2017 19:36, Christoph Schäfer <christoph-schaefer@gmx.de> wrote:

Hi all,



I have some incredible news for you.


Yesterday freieFarbe/freeColour received a message from the German
industrial standards organisation (DIN) that our proposal for an open
standard for "Open Colour Communication" based on the HLC colour model (aka
as Lhc) has been accepted and will become a German national standard soon
(because we have prepared this carefully during 2016 and 2017).


What does this mean? First, it will no longer be an initiative by a tiny
non-profit organisation, but a national standard, and since DIN is very
influential internationally, it will become a de-facto standard in other
countries as well. Plus, it may be possible to make this an ISO standard
via DIN.


In addition, DIN will support the formulation of the standard and our work
with substantial sums, not the least because the creation of a standard and
pushing its way through all the respective instances and expert checks is
expensive (would've been 25,000 EUR in our case, which has been reduced to
zero, because it's an open and non-commercial project). We will also
receive some money for meetings, travel expenses etc. from DIN.


One of the reasons we got so far is support by parts of the printing
industry in Germany and Switzerland. The prototype of the printed colour
reference, which we presented to DIN, was only possible thanks to a
donation of inks by an international manufacturer of digitial printing
machines. We're currently cooperating with ink manufacturers in Germany and
Switzerland to establish ink formulas for HLC colours that cannot be
reproduced in CMYK, aka as spot colours, so printing companies can actually
order spot colour inks by just inserting the HLC colour code in their order
forms.


The printed colour reference has the form a ring binder. Colours are
sorted by their H-values (H=Hue) in steps of ten. Luminacity (L) uses steps
of five, and chroma (C) also steps of ten. We plan to refine this later to
also present the H-values in steps of five.


This is a real colour system and not just a colour collection like Pantone
or RAL. Most importantly, it is a free and open alternative to Pantone &
co, which is not only better, but also supported by a national standards
organisation and some major players in the industry. There are no licensing
costs to pay for anyone who wants to use the colour system, not for
software producers and neither for the ink mixing formulas. The latter is
important, because vendors like Pantone ask for a lot of money from ink
producers for the mixing formulas, whilst the open HLC system is gratis.


The PDF version of the colour reference and the digital colour palettes
will be published under a CC licence (CC BY-ND 4.0). The printed colour
reference will cost some money to cover the production costs, but it will
be much cheaper than the ones from Pantone & co, because we only need to
cover our expenses and do not intend/aren't allowed to as a non-profit
organisation to commercialise it. Moreover, everyone else will be free to
print their own references, and there are no trademarks involved.


Another important aspect is that the HLC colour system, being a national
standard, will be very hard to attack legally by commercial vendors like
Pantone or RAL, who are known to play hardball when it comes to
competition. They would have to take on DIN, which I'm sure they'll think
about twice.


We'll start with Germany and Switzerland, because that's where most of our
members and supporters are from, but we plan to release an English version
of the colour reference as soon as the colour system has been formally
adapted as a standard.


Currently, an older version of the HLC palette is already included in
Scribus 1.5.3+ (L*a*b*) and the latest LibreOffice (sRGB). And speaking of
Scribus, the juicy bit is that the colour reference will most likely be
produced with Scribus 1.5.4svn, because it offers the highest colour
precision for fill colours (64 bit). No other DTP software comes close in
this regard.



Christoph
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