[Scribus] Color swatches - Legal and technical issues

[Olivier BERTEN]

Hi!

I've been looking around about color swatches in Scribus these last days 
and I happen to ask myself some questions.

Legal issues :
- Is it ok to use proprietary swatches (read Pantone) outside of the 
application it's distributed with?
- Is it ok to convert these swatches into another format?

Concretely: you can install a demo version of InDesign or QuarkXPress, 
which are distributed with a dozen of proprietary swatches. The XPress 7 
ones are in xml format so it would be easy to import and the Adobe Color 
Book binary format is quite easy to read. So the question is now: is it 
conceivable to include these formats into the colour import function?

I'm trying to make a convertor for acb (CS2 and CS3) to sla: 
http://www.olivierberten.info/scribus/#acb2sla
It's not yet fully functionnal since the L*a*b data are given as-is... 
and Scribus doesn't yet support it...
(if someone has a Lab2sRGB convert script in PHP, it would be helpful... 
I'm not very good at PHP maths...)

Technical issues
- I've seen L*a*b support is in project 
<http://wiki.scribus.net/index.php/Colour_Requirements> but it's not on 
the roadmap. It would be quite useful for the spot colours since all 
software now use the L*a*b data in their spot colour lists...
- The current swatch format is quite basic and doesn't include "spot" 
info (I've started the page 
<http://wiki.scribus.net/index.php/New_Colours_Format> following the 
1.3.6 stage of the roadmap)
- By default, the colour list is alphabetically sorted. Is it possible 
to disable this? In some swatches, the colour order is quite significant...

Olivier