ColorBrewer.jl

A small library for generating color brewer color palettes. For more information on color brewer, see http://colorbrewer2.org/.

About

The color brewer palette collection was originally designed for maps, but is also useful for quickly generating nice colors for any kind of plot.

Setup

This package is now registered. Add it with

Pkg.add("ColorBrewer");

You can also add it with

Pkg.clone("git://github.com/timothyrenner/ColorBrewer.jl.git");

Usage

The module contains one function, palette, which takes a scheme name and an integer for the number of colors in the palette. It returns an array of RGB values, which are defined in the ColorTypes.jl package.

For example, to obtain a five color sequential green scheme, call

    using ColorBrewer

    greens = palette("Greens", 5);

Pretty simple stuff.

It can drop right into Gadfly plots.

    using Gadfly

    p = plot([x -> sin(n*x) for n in 1:3], 0, 25, 
             Scale.color_discrete_manual(greens[3:5]...))

If the palette function is passed an invalid scheme or number of colors, it throws an ArgumentError.

The schemes are broken up into three categories based on the type of data you want to show: sequential, diverging, and qualitative.

All sequential color schemes can have between 3 and 9 colors. The available sequential color schemes are:

Name	Example
Blues
Oranges
Greens
Reds
Purples
Greys
OrRd
GnBu
PuBu
PuRd
BuPu
BuGn
YlGn
RdPu
YlOrBr
YlGnBu
YlOrRd
PuBuGn

All diverging color schemes can have between 3 and 11 colors. The available diverging color schemes are:

Name	Example
Spectral
RdYlGn
RdBu
PiYG
PRGn
RdYlBu
BrBG
RdGy
PuOr

The number of colors a qualitative color scheme can have depends on the scheme. The available qualitative color schemes are:

Name	Example
Set1
Set2
Set3
Accent
Dark2
Paired
Pastel1
Pastel2

The Paired and Set3 schemes can have between 3 and 12 colors. The Pastel1 and Set1 schemes can have between 3 and 9 colors. The Set2, Accent, Dark2, and Pastel2 schemes can have between 3 and 8 colors.

Thanks

Huge thanks to ikirill for providing the color scheme previews!