On Tue, Oct 21, 2014 at 8:09 PM, Eric Firing <ef...@ha...> wrote: > On 2014年10月21日, 6:27 AM, Nathaniel Smith wrote: >> On Tue, Oct 21, 2014 at 8:50 AM, Pierre Haessig >> <pie...@cr...> wrote: >>> Hi, >>> >>> Matlab is now shipping with a new default colormap, named "parula" >>> [1,2]. It is meant to overcome the many issues of the current default >>> "jet". It seems that the RGB values of this new colormap are already >>> onnline [3]. >>> >>> So my question is: >>> * is it worth adding this parula in the Matplotlib colormap collection ? >>> (I think it is) >>> * is there any copyright issue with that ? (I have no idea how >>> copyrightable a list of numbers is !) >> >> The general rule is that copyright requires "creative expression". >> This is a pretty marginal case at best, since that the colormap >> appears to have been derived by solving an optimization problem, but >> worst case we could always re-solve that optimization problem >> ourselves. (I've played before with using CAM02-UCS to automatically >> generate perceptually uniform colormaps - it's not terribly difficult >> to do.) >> > There are additional considerations, such as working well for the most > common form of color-blindness, providing as much resolution as > possible, and being aesthetically pleasing to most people. Sure, but the first two of those are just extra constraints on the optimization. Apparently they'll be making another blog post soon describing the actual constraints they used. -- Nathaniel J. Smith Postdoctoral researcher - Informatics - University of Edinburgh http://vorpus.org