[?] Export palette from Mathematica into .pal file

Questions
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1

Hi.

I would like to export a colour palette from Mathematica to Origin8.5. The Origin manual says that this requires a file in the format .pal (Microsoft palette format). I could not figure out so far how to create such file using Mathematica. I saw that someone did this with Matlab (see here: http://de.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/43114-cmap2pal-convert-matlab-colormap-to-binary-pal-format?requestedDomain=www.mathworks.com )

which actually works nicely. Anyone experience with such a thing? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks, Markus

2

May I ask why do you need that if you can plot most of things in Mathematica directly?

3

I followed this description: Making sure you're not a bot!

SetDirectory[NotebookDirectory[]];
ClearAll[ExportPal]
ExportPal[fnout_String,colors_List]:=Module[{colorout,length,str},colorout=Select[colors,ColorQ];
    If[Length[colorout]>0,
        colorout=List@@@(ColorConvert[#,"RGB"]&/@colorout);
        colorout=Take[#,3]&/@colorout; (* remove alpha channel if present *)
        colorout=Append[0]/@Round[255 colorout];
        length=4+4+4+4+2+2+4Length[colors];
        str=OpenWrite[fnout,BinaryFormat->True];
        BinaryWrite[str,"RIFF"];
        BinaryWrite[str,length,"Integer32"];
        BinaryWrite[str,"PAL "];
        BinaryWrite[str,"data"];
        BinaryWrite[str,4Length[colors]+4,"Integer32"];
        BinaryWrite[str,16^^0300,"Integer16"];
        BinaryWrite[str,Length[colors],"Integer16"];
        BinaryWrite[str,Join@@colorout,"Byte"];
        Close[str]
    ,
        Print["plz check z colors, something wrong! kthxbye!"];
        Abort[]
    ]
]
ExportPal["out.pal",{RGBColor[0.5,0.1,0.8,0.1],Blue,Green,LABColor[0.33,-0.48,-0.54]}]

Unfortunately I don’t have any software to test the pal file… so let me know if it works…

4

Dear Sander. It works. This is very nice, thank you for the help. This tool will be very helpful for me in the future. Best, Markus

5

You’re welcome! It is not often that my software works at first try :wink:

6

I made a small update to the code, in case you give an rgb color with alpha-channel.