Hacker News Reader

This looks really useful. I've played around with colormaps in a few visualization projects, but I've never made the time to learn about the various color packages.

What does this add to colormath and grapefruit?

View on HN

Thanks! Colormath does an amazing job handling the mathematical conversions between color spaces, but has (at least to me) a somewhat verbose API. Spectra wraps that API in something simpler, and adds scales, ranges, blending, brightening/darkening, and saturation/desaturation.

Spectra uses grapefruit for parsing HTML names and hexcodes.

I'm most excited about the color scales. It looks like a helpful tool for situations where the standard colormaps in matplotlib/pyplot don't work well. Is that an appropriate use case?

I also like seeing nbviewer used for documentation, I haven't seen that very often.

> It looks like a helpful tool for situations where the standard colormaps in matplotlib/pyplot don't work well. Is that an appropriate use case?

Yes, that's definitely the type of use-case I had in mind. Another big one: Choropleth maps.

> I also like seeing nbviewer used for documentation, I haven't seen that very often.

Glad to hear it! It's my first attempt at writing documentation in an IPython notebook. Seemed like a good fit for something so visual.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com