Re: freieFarbe/freeColour HLC colour system to be accepted as a national standard for "Open Colour Communication" in Germany

Hi Christoph,

many thanks for your continuous work and congratulations to become a standard. Shared your message 
on Open Source Design 
https://discourse.opensourcedesign.net/t/freecolour-hlc-color-palette-becomes-a-din-standard/500 
<https://discourse.opensourcedesign.net/t/freecolour-hlc-color-palette-becomes-a-din-standard/500>, 
would be good to have your expertise there as well.

Cheers,
Heiko

> Am 01.12.2017 um 04:36 schrieb Christoph Schäfer <christoph-schaefer@gmx.de>:
>
> 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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