Cristine Henderson Posted January 26, 2005 Share Posted January 26, 2005 I am using Mac OS X.3.7 Vectorworks 10.5.1 I would like to know how to quantify colors so that when I look at a color palette I will know what color is going to plot. Quote Link to comment
jan15 Posted January 26, 2005 Share Posted January 26, 2005 You have to print the color palette out on each printer you're going to use. I've found huge differences between different models of HP printers, and none of them printed anything like the screen colors. My old Epson 1160 seemed to pretty much match the screen colors, but that may have been just luck. The only way I know of to print the color palette is to draw a facsimile of it, as a 16 x 16 element array of solid-filled squares, with each color in the color palette assigned to the corresponding square in the drawing. Quote Link to comment
Adrian Posted January 27, 2005 Share Posted January 27, 2005 yes. i used to do the square thingy in my last office. a pain at the start but once you print them out, the printout saves you huge amount of time knowing the colour will appear as you want them to be. hopefully there'll be more colours to be added in future versions. pantone range perhaps on the main palette? Quote Link to comment
mike m oz Posted January 27, 2005 Share Posted January 27, 2005 Choice of multiple color Pallettes in the same document - reserved colours - modifiable colours - Pantone Colours - websafe colours - AutoCad colours - etc. OR PERHAPS A more rational Maunsell based system with popouts for the different hue chroma values. It shouldn't be too hard to provide a choice of perhaps 512 or 1024 colours which would be much better. Quote Link to comment
jan15 Posted January 27, 2005 Share Posted January 27, 2005 You can mix your own colors, you know. To customize any of the colors except the top three and a half rows. And you can save any color palette you make by saving the file it's in, and then later import that color palette into any other file. All with the "Set Attribute Defaults" command. Quote Link to comment
CipesDesign Posted January 27, 2005 Share Posted January 27, 2005 Jan, WOW! I never knew that. It's almost embarrasing. I guess that will be my "one new thing" learned today. Thanks! :-) Quote Link to comment
jan15 Posted January 27, 2005 Share Posted January 27, 2005 Peter, I understand how you feel. That happens to me continually while reading this forum. The color customization has been there forever, and it's one of the thousands of things the high-priced CAD program still can't do. It allows you to match paint colors or a client's trademark colors exactly, though you have to adjust the colors to suit the printer. I tend to create classes just for colors, like "CB Brown-HP1220", "CB Brown-HP500", etc. Quote Link to comment
Cristine Henderson Posted January 27, 2005 Author Share Posted January 27, 2005 Has anyone imported a Pantone color palatte into Vectorworks? Quote Link to comment
mike m oz Posted January 28, 2005 Share Posted January 28, 2005 The following website contains the pantone colours with their RGB compositions - it may be possible to make up your own pallette if you have the patience. The problem is which colours to include out of the hundreds available. http://www.seoconsultants.com/css/colors/conversion/ There are a couple of pallettes which can be downloaded from the VectorDepot site which may be of use to you: - focoltone pallette in the miscellaneous section (Adobe photoshop colours) - web pallette in the drawings section (websafe colours) There is also a color pattern drawing in the drawings section which has all of the VW colours set out in a couple of ways. If you print this off it may provide you with a useful guide for selecting from the standard colours. http://vectordepot.com/ [ 01-28-2005, 02:39 AM: Message edited by: mike m oz ] Quote Link to comment
Niblick Posted January 28, 2005 Share Posted January 28, 2005 The best way I know of printing the colour palette is as it says in the handbook: Tool>Utilities>Create Color Chart If desired select the Show color palette index numbers Scale up all the boxes to the size you want. I scaled mine up to a A0 sheet and hang it up on the wall next to me. jan15, I know you can mix colours (I do it in the gradient palette) but how do you transfer this to a palette file and where is the colour palette and how do you import this file to a working file? Cheers, Brian Phillips Golf Course Architect Niblick Golf Design Norway XP VW 11 Landmark Quote Link to comment
jan15 Posted January 28, 2005 Share Posted January 28, 2005 quote: Originally posted by Niblick: The best way I know of printing the colour palette is as it says in the handbook: Tool>Utilities>Create Color Chart As Peter said, "WOW!" I went to all that trouble to draw a color chart, when I could have just clicked once on a pull-down menu. Brian, I don't have version 11 yet, but up to v10 it worked this way: The color palette is stored in each drawing file. So you can save a blank drawing file with your custom color palette and call it "Colors01.mcd". Then you can make that the color palette of any other drawing file by pulling down Page > Set Attribute Defaults > Color Palette... (which opens the "Edit Color Palette" window), and clicking on "Import..." Browse till you find the file "Colors01.mcd", select it and click "Open", and its color palette becomes the color palette of the current file. That same "Edit Color Palette" window is where I go to make custom colors, by selecting a cell and then clicking on "Pick Color..." It sounds like you know of a different method. I've never heard of the "gradient palette" you referred to. Quote Link to comment
mike m oz Posted January 29, 2005 Share Posted January 29, 2005 Cristine There is a reference to a Pantone Color Picker in the 3rd Party Plug-Ins section of the NNA Partners area, which sounds as if it would solve your problem Unfortunately the link no longer works. I did a quick search of the Apple Support area and it appears as if it was only a pre OSX option. A search on the web only brought up pre OSX info as well for system colour pickers - it seems as though this is another feature of the old OS which was not implemented in OSX. I hope I am wrong and someone out there knows of a 3rd party option for this. Added Postscript: I just did a bit more web searching and it appears that PANTONE? colorist may provide an answer (US$50). It works for all OS's. http://www.pantone.com/products/products.asp?idSubArea=0&idArea=3&idProduct=319&idArticleType_Products=0&ShowNav=27 If anyone out there has used it perhaps they can comment. [ 01-29-2005, 02:05 AM: Message edited by: mike m oz ] Quote Link to comment
mike m oz Posted January 29, 2005 Share Posted January 29, 2005 It seems there is an issue about matching the Windows and OSX colour pallettes - with the standard 256 colour pallettes there are only 216 colours that are 'common'. More information at http://www.uwsp.edu/it/telecomm/utdlr/tutorials/WebSafeColors.htm Quote Link to comment
Marietta Posted January 31, 2005 Share Posted January 31, 2005 In the colour pallette editing box, there are 15 squares at the bottom where you can 'reserve' custom colours. Click on a standard colour, click 'pick color', and when you have the colour adjusted to where you like, you can drag the colour at the top bar to one of the bottom squares. these colours will then show up on all your files in this edit box. This way, you can copy only specific custom colours if you don't want to import the whole colour chart. Quote Link to comment
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