R/pals_package.R

In pals: Color Palettes, Colormaps, and Tools to Evaluate Them

# pals_package.R

#' pals: A package for comprehensive palettes and palette evaluation tools
#'
#' pals: A package for comprehensive palettes and palette evaluation tools
#'
#' The terms 'palette' and 'colormap' are often interchanged. In this package
#' (1) 'palette' is usually a discrete set of distinct colors and
#' (2) 'colormap' is usually a smoothly varying set of many colors.
#' 
#' The best palette/colormap is determined by
#' (1) the type of structure in the data,
#' (2) the type of graphic to be constructed, and
#' (3) the type of device used to show the graphic.
#' The ColorBrewer website approaches this problem by suggesting different
#' colors for qualitative, sequential, and diverging data, and also
#' considers the display of the graphic on LCD and photocopies.
#' One limitation with ColorBrewer is that it only uses maps, and does not
#' consider other types of graphics.
#' For example, yellow colors work well for polygons (on maps, barcharts, etc),
#' but are poor for lines and scatter plots.
#' 
#' The 'pals' package provides a suite of tools to evaluate palettes/colormaps.
#' 
#' The design goals of the package are:
#' \itemize{
#'
#' \item
#' All palettes/colormaps are functions that return a vector of colors.
#'
#' \item
#' The palette function names use only lowercase letters.
#'
#' \item
#' The 'data' directory is not used.
#'
#' \item
#' Provide an extensive collection of palettes and colormaps.
#'
#' \item
#' Be memory efficient.  Colormaps are compressed.
#'
#' \item
#' Provide multiple tools to evaluate palettes.
#' }
#'
#' To learn more, see the vignettes:
#' \code{browseVignettes(package="pals")}
#'
#' @name pals
#' @aliases pals-package
#' @import graphics
#' @import grDevices
NULL