[R-pkgs] colorspace: interactive HCL palette chooser

[Achim Zeileis]

Dear useRs,

we have just released a new version (1.2-0) of the "colorspace" package:
http://CRAN.R-project.org/package=colorspace

In addition to the infrastructure for transforming colors between 
different color spaces (RGB, HSV, HCL, and various others) and support for 
different types of color palettes (qualitative, sequential, diverging), 
there is now a new graphical user interface (GUI) for choosing suitable 
HCL-based color palettes: choose_palette().

The Tcl/Tk-based GUI features a broad range of different palettes from and 
lets the user interactively modify the underlying parameters (hue, chroma, 
luminance, ...) to produce new palettes. It allows for easy exploration of 
the effects of color blindness (through Thomas Lumley's "dichromat" 
package) and of desaturation (emulating a grayscale printout for example). 
The GUI contains various types of graphics (maps, heatmaps, barplots, line 
and scatterplots, ...) that can be checked to see how a chosen palette 
looks in practice.

Most of the coding for the new GUI was done by new package co-author Jason 
C. Fisher. To check it out, simply run

example(choose_palette)

after installing and loading the latest version of "colorspace" from CRAN.
Background information on the implemented palettes is provided in:

Achim Zeileis, Kurt Hornik, Paul Murrell (2009).
Escaping RGBland: Selecting Colors for Statistical Graphics.
Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, 53, 3259-3270.
doi:10.1016/j.csda.2008.11.033

Best wishes,
Z