In the first article in this series I pointed out some problems I and other LibreOffice users have with the standard LibreOffice color palette, and I talked about how colors are specified, both on computers in general and within LibreOffice .soc files. Let’s now see how to generate a new set of colors.
The process requires finding some base colors to start with and scripting some code to build darker and lighter variations of them. Since I’m not particularly gifted (rather the contrary!) in artistic color-related work, I needed to get my colors from someplace. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) provides a list of color names as used in CSS (cascading style sheets). However, that list is in alphabetic order, and I’d rather group colors in families (reds, greens, blues, browns, and so on). A Wikipedia article provides a suitable table. With some cutting, pasting, and minor editing, I ended with the following text file:
