Colored Bar Paper Colors | Hacker News Reader

Colored Bar Paper Colors

mw.rat.bz

27 pointsm_walden8 comments

Without any sort of additional information this seems like just random assortment of colors author happened to like. This sort of article would be much more valuable if it had information how the specific color values were produced.

I agree -- color bars pre-printed on tractor-feed paper would have used a Pantone ink, maybe a tint of 290 for blue, or 358 for green. Mills wouldn't have likely used a C+M+Y build: Why pay for three inks (and the potential for misregistration) when you can just use one? There might have even been a special machine to print the lines at regular intervals, and not run through a traditional offset printing press.

Pantone inks in specific, and printed colors in general, don't convert precisely to RGB. Ambient light reflects off paper to your eyeballs; a screen beams light into your eyeballs.

It's a nice little nostalgic thought exercise, though.

It wouldn't necessarily be a Pantone shade — that costs extra, and any mid-green is adequate.

The pictures on the Wikipedia article show several shades of green: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_stationery

Of course if you are really interested you can just buy a box of green-bar paper. It's still in mass-production. E.g. Staples carries it https://www.staples.com/Staples-Green-Bar-Computer-Paper-14-...

The inks probably might have changed over the decades, so it might look different than genuine '70s paper. But on the other hand I'd imagine there are literal tons of green-bar paper sitting in archives from various times and sources if you want to do some archeology

All of the color values were collected over a long period (years) of collecting that I did for personal reasons. It was only recently I decided to publicly post them. I am sorry I did not keep specific details.

> This page has simulations of colored bar papers which are not meant to mislead you into thinking they are real images. They are just here to illustrate what real colored bar papers would look like in various different colors.

Well... if your monitor is calibrated to show real print colours... or whatever the proper term is for that. Obviously my monitor isn't.

All the fanfold green-barred paper I used had the green as a pinstripe, so it's hard to say which is closest, but I think it was probably either the #BB.. or #CC 'green's BUT perceived like the #A9 green because of the pinstripe effect.

Might be used as a text editor feature, to offer line oriented rather than structural emphasis. Not sure it’s a winner, but it makes for an interesting thought experiment.

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