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vtraag / tikz-colorbrewer

Definition files providing colours as defined by the ColorBrewer project.
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Different approach #4

Open benjamin-weiss opened 9 years ago

benjamin-weiss commented 9 years ago

I recently started to develop a LaTeX package where I want to make the colors defined by Paul Tol in his SRON Technical Note easily available in LaTeX. So I'm facing the similar problems. Mainly the problem, that it is not possible to combine multiple cycle list in pgfplots. Yet I choose a slightly different approach. I wrote a helper macro to define my cycle lists sroncreateplotcyclelist. This could also be helpful for you, to solve your file size and performance issue. But the macro is not so powerful yet to solve every problem. You can only give it a list of colors and keywords. So basically you can only define cycle list in the following forms.

\pgfplotscreateplotcyclelist{cycleLine}{draw=mycolor1, draw=mycolor2, draw=mycolor3}
\pgfplotscreateplotcyclelist{cycleBar}{{draw=mycolor1, fill=mycolor1}, {draw=mycolor2, fill=mycolor2}, {draw=mycolor3, fill=mycolor3}}

Take a look at my implementation: https://github.com/benjamin-weiss/sron-colors

Maybe it is also the way to go for you and we can combine our efforts.

P.S. I would drop the gnuplot dependency in your display_colorcycle.tex example. Not everyone has it installed. Also some editors nowadays use a hidden temporary folder to build tex files. If they do so the gnuplot output cannot be found. All in all, this can cause some problems for the unexperienced user which can be easily avoided.

vtraag commented 9 years ago

Thanks for the suggestion! Your package looks great. I'll take a look when I get around to it.

benjamin-weiss commented 9 years ago

Thank you for the compliment!

There is also a new competing colorbrewer package.

Stack Exchange Question Source code on launchpad

Although it is still not perfect, it uses a very promising idea to handle the multiple cycle lists. Instead of handling them with mostly TeX primitives like I do, it uses pgfplotstable to do that. This should make it easier to write a really universal helper macro.

If you don't know it yet and have the time, you should also have a look at the SRON Technical Note. It is a really interesting read.

vtraag commented 9 years ago

That looks great! Sounds like a good way to go. As far as competition goes: as long as there's a good package for using colorbrewer colours, I'm happy to use any alternatives :) Unfortunately I don't really have the time to go through the SRON note in detail, but it indeed looked interesting.