Color names and the 10 elementary colors?
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg67528] Color names and the 10 elementary colors?
- From: AES <siegman at stanford.edu>
- Date: Fri, 30 Jun 2006 04:13:47 -0400 (EDT)
- Organization: Stanford University
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
When I recently inquired about using the names of Mathematica colors
("CinnabarGreen", etc.) as label strings in a series of test plots,
several responses proposed that I needed to manually input the names in
quotes. Brian Higgins suggested, however, a terse but somewhat arcane
way to get color names as strings together with the corresponding RGB
values with the Input line
allColorNames =
({#1, ToColor[ ToExpression[#1], RGBColor]}&) /@ AllColors;
so that the Input
allColorNames[[4]]
produces the Output
{ Apricot, RGBColor[1., 0.340007, 0.129994] }
(although his Output showed quotes around "Apricot" and mine doesn't.)
Since my objective was to test all varieties of Green, I added to this a
more crudely programmed statement to generate a list of all the green
color names and color values, viz.
allGreens={ };
Do[
If[ StringMatchQ[ allColorNames[[k,1]], "*Green*" ],
AppendTo[ allGreens, allColorNames[[k]] ] ],
{k, 1, Length[ allColorNames ]} ];
This works fine -- until you notice that just plain "Green" itself is
not in the resulting list. In fact, Green (along with Red, Blue, Brown,
Orange, and 4 or 5 other "elementary colors") is not in AllColors.
I believe in earlier versions of Mathematica one had to use Graphics`Colors` to
access even these elementary colors, and so they were presumably once
included in AllColors (?); and I think I've learned somewhere that 10 or
so of these elementary colors are now included within "plain
Mathematica" and no long require calling the Graphics`Colors` package.
But:
1) I'd sure like to understand the logic of not continuing to use these
colors in AllColors nonetheless. Removing them seems a confusing and
less than helpful choice to me at any rate. And,
2) Where -- or more important, how -- can the nonexpert user get at the
list of these elementary colors?
As a challenge, try invoking online Help on "Color" or "Colors" or any
one of the elementary color names, and see if, using no more than 5
subsequent mouse clicks within the Help screen, no typing, and no
pre-existing expert knowledge, just "common sense", you can find your
way to the list of those colors.