Graphics::Toolkit::Color::Manual::Name(3)  User Contributed Perl Documentation


NAME
       Graphics::Toolkit::Color::Manual::Name - GTC color name handling

SYNOPSIS
       This manual page explains all there is to know when using color names
       in GTC. The first chapter describes their role in the overall
       functionality of the library.  The second defines their syntax. (How to
       write them?)  The next outlines the coverage of the built-in names
       (default scheme).  And the last chapter illustrates the concept of a
       color scheme and how to use them.  This is important background to
       understand the results and inner workings of the methods: name and
       closest_name.

ROLE
       Because it is intuitive and relatively effortless for humans to refer
       to colors by name, GTC can interpret them as a convenience.  But after
       the name is read, it gets translated into RGB values, since most GTC
       functionality is about calculating numeric color values.  So color
       names are just one format among many and thus mostly a part of the IO
       layer.

SYNTAX
       Color names are mere strings that get normalized to allow a greater
       flexibility in usage.  Upper and lower case can be chosen freely. And
       also some special characters like the underscore '_', dash '-',
       whitespace ' ', the apostrophe ' and the dot '.', that are even
       sometimes part of the official name, may be inserted or removed. That
       can sometimes improve readability ('true_red') or help you to adapt the
       spelling of color names to local standards without additional effort.
       GTC output will always contain normalized names without special
       characters and in complete lowercase.

       There is only one character in GTC color names that holds a special
       meaning, which is the colon ':'. It separates the scheme name on the
       left side from the actual color name on the right ('SVG:green'). You
       might think of schemes as name spaces for color names. Color names
       without a colon are from the default scheme ('blue').

DEFAULT
       The default scheme contains 716 color names which all can be retrieved
       with:

         my @names = Graphics::Toolkit::Color::Name::all();

       But they can also be seen by name and with their color displayed under:
       "NAMES" in Graphics::Toolkit::Color::Name::Constant.  They are
       assembled from the X11 and HTML (SVG) standard, which are most of the
       commonly used color names on the internet.  But a lot of them are not
       aesthetically pleasing. For that reason also the colors of the Pantone
       reports were added. They often have longer, more complicated names but
       they are picked by designers.

       Because the default scheme contains so many names, some colors end up
       with having several names. For that reason the names are grouped by
       importance, so if you ask for just one color name, you will get the
       better known one (for instance 'gray' and not 'gray50').

SCHEME
       Besides the just mentioned default color name scheme, there are no
       other schemes that come with GTC. They have to be obtained separately.
       For instance to access the names of the SVG standard, you have to
       install the module Graphics::ColorNames::SVG, which of course depends
       on the module Graphics::ColorNames. The list of available schemes
       includes: Crayola, CSS, EmergyC, GrayScale, HTML, IE, Mozilla,
       Netscape, Pantone, PantoneReport, SVG, VACCC, Werner, Windows and WWW.
       The following code will check what is already installed:

          my @schemes = Graphics::ColorNames::all_schemes();

       Conveniently all modules can be installed at once with
       Bundle::Graphics::ColorNames and you can also create your own, which is
       explained here.

AUTHOR
       Herbert Breunung, <lichtkind@cpan.org>

COPYRIGHT
       Copyright 2026 Herbert Breunung.

LICENSE
       This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
       under the same terms as Perl itself.

perl v5.42.2                      2026-06-21
                                     Graphics::Toolkit::Color::Manual::Name(3)