[Matplotlib-devel] [rfc] a better interchange format for colormaps

[Nathaniel Smith]

Hi matplotters,

We've been working on improving our tool for building custom
viridis-like colormaps (e.g. adding support for diverging colormaps),
and one of the things that we got frustrated by is how there's no
compelling way to save and distribute the resulting colormaps so that
people can actually use them. So, I wrote up a little spec to
standardize a way of storing and distributing colormaps in JSON, with
the hope that we can convince everyone to implement this and stop
writing silly little conversion scripts all the time.

The v0.1 draft is here:
    https://github.com/njsmith/json-cm/blob/master/json-cm-spec.md

Any comments? There are always a lot of fiddly details to get right in
this kind of thing -- I made a bunch of guesses about what kind of
stuff is important and how to represent it, but it can only benefit
from review from different perspectives. I would equally love to get
nitpicky critiques and high-level queries.

Thanks!
-n

-- 
Nathaniel J. Smith -- https://vorpus.org