The ColorTools package contains functions for working with and converting colors, working with color palettes, and doing conversions for: color names, internationalized color strings, hex color codes, decimal RGB sequences, and float sequences.

The core color type is the decimal RGB sequence, and it can be used as a central point for conversion from one type to another.

The following is a list of the main color formats handled by ColorTools

RGB24 -- 24-bit RGB, integer values 0-255: [r,g,b]

RGB -- Float RGB values 0.0-1.0: [rf,gf,bf]

Hex -- Hex code in string form, e.g. either "#rrggbb" or "rrggbb"

Name -- Named colors, old: 'black', 'BLACK' or new: "Black". For a list of built-in color names, see GetColorNames.

String -- International strings - string form of Name but translated with GetMessage

PlotColor -- COLOR primitive for plots: COLOR(RGB,x,y,z).  See plot/structure.

Color -- A data structure encoding other color spaces. It is detailed in ColorTools[Color].

For additional information, including a complete list of known color spaces, see ColorSpaces.

Hex/Name/String convert to/from RGB24 values, so to convert from xxx to yyy usually one must convert xxx to RGB24 then RGB24 to yyy.

The Color data structure generally uses floating-point RGB for intermediate calculations to avoid loss of precision from the 8 bits per channel restriction of RGB24.

For an overview, see Color Collections and Color Maps for Use with Plots.

The ColorTools package was introduced in Maple 16.

For more information on Maple 16 changes, see Updates in Maple 16.