I was thinking of doing some work with the web safe palette (6 level per channel RGB colour cube, with a bunch of colours left over for special purpose uses) but layout of this palette in most editors is a real pain which got me thinking.
Anyone thought much about or know of existing systems for better palette layout?
Pro Motion and GraphicsGale just give you a fixed 16x16 grid.
GrafX2 does give flexibility to adjust the number of rows and columns shown within its palette window but its fixed sizing is so cramped and awkward.
Gimp allows the setting of a fixed number of columns per palette.
Aseprite allow resizing sidebar size and fixed swatch size options.
Palettes made of a number of fixed size ramps suffer when each ramps on each row are offset and splitting across line breaks. (Gimp and Aseprite can layout this style fine.)
Palettes made of a number of variable sized ramps always suffer splitting across line breaks.
Colour cube palettes particularly suffer when not laid out in slices. (eg. in a 16 column layout web safe 6 level per channel is just about unusable, CPC 3 level per channel requires padding.)
I'm thinking we need some way to define contiguous blocks (ramps/slices) with control over line breaking within blocks.
// wrapping line break every 6 colours
{
breakType: soft,
repeatBreak : 6
}
// forced line break every 8 colours
{
breakType: hard,
repeatBreak : 8
}
// group every 36 colours, within group forced line break every 6 colours (web safe)
{
breakType: soft,
repeatGroup: {
length: 36,
breakType: hard,
repeatBreak : 6
}
}
// variable length ramps with wrapping breaks
{
breakType: soft,
run: 8,
run: 12,
run: 8,
run: 8,
run: 6,
run: 6,
run: 16
}
