## SwatchBooker

Just like old habits die hard, many designers rely on color palettes from vendors like Pantone®, RAL®, Toyo®, or others, and especially those that have been shipped with the drawing or design application they’ve been used to for years or decades.

Although the Scribus Team has succeeded in licensing many palettes, not all efforts were successful (yet), which means you may have to get the palettes you need from other resources. The Scribus Team is aware of some external palette collections in Scribus’s own palette format that contain these colors, but we cannot endorse their use, since their legality is as questionable as their reliability.

In the meantime you can take solace in the fact that the initiative FreeColour has released a collection of more than 350 commercial color systems under a CC license. The color palettes are stored in SwatchBooker’s native SBZ format, but you can use the program to convert them to Scribus XML files.

Until the licensing issues with regard to Scribus are solved, and as long as you have a valid license for a program like CorelDraw, PageMaker or InDesign, you should be free to use the included color palettes in Scribus, even though Scribus doesn’t support many proprietary color palette formats yet. This is where SwatchBooker becomes an essential tool. SwatchBooker will not only help you to convert color palettes, whether they be proprietary or Open Source, for use with Scribus; you can also modify existing palette files by changing color values, assigning color profiles or translating color names.

If you use SwatchBooker for anything but color palette conversion, you do so at your own risk. Changing names of spot colors or their alternative L*a*b/CMYK/RGB values may result in serious color mismatches, and it defies the very purpose of standardized color sets.

Requirements:

Python, PyQt4, littleCMS

Installers:

- Linux: Packages for many distributions are available via the respective repositories. If your distro doesn’t provide one, you can install the dependencies mentioned above and then download the source code here (no installation required).
- A Windows installer is available here.
- The easiest way to install SwatchBooker on Mac OS X is via Homebrew. The Homebrew formula is available here.

Supported file formats:

- Import: Adobe (ACO, ACB, ACT, ASE, ACF, BCF, CLR); AutoCAD (ACB; unencrypted only!); ColorSchemer (CS); Corel (CPL); GIMP (GPL); ICC named color profiles; OpenOffice.org (SOC); QuarkXPress (QCL+CUI; note that you need both files to be able to convert an XPress Color Library); RAL Digital/Digital Colour Atlas (BCS); RIFF (PAL); Scribus (XML); VivaDesigner (XML)
- Export: Adobe Swatch Exchange (ASE); GIMP (GPL); HTML; SwatchBooker (SBZ), OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice (SOC); Scribus (XML)