For a long time now I have wanted to have a full set of Pantone swatches in the Mac OSX color picker. I searched for a quick solution online but never found anything. So in the end I realised that if this was going to happen I would have to do something about it myself Pantone Swatches in the Mac OSX Color Picker Stage 1 – getting a list of swatchesWhilst it’s very easy to create a custom color palette and add your own colors to it I had no particular desire to try and enter an entire Pantone swatch book by hand. A quick search online revealed several sites with lists of swatches and their respective rgb values. So that’s great – the difficult part has already been done by someone else!

I checked out a few lists and in the end settled on this one: which gave a full set with hex and rgb values laid out in a just perfect for scraping with php. Stage 2 – scraping the data into a databaseThe next task was to get the data off the webpage and into a database. For tasks like this I always use.

It’s very easy to learn – and makes this kind of task very simple.Before writing a script to scrape the data I set up a myqsl database ‘pantoneswatches’ with a table ‘coatedswatches’ to hold the data. Enabling option key shortcuts in matlab for mac. The table structure was as follows.

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CREATE TABLE `coatedswatches` (`id` int(11) unsigned NOT NULL AUTOINCREMENT,`name` varchar(50) DEFAULT NULL,`hex` varchar(7) DEFAULT NULL,`red` varchar(5) DEFAULT NULL,`green` varchar(5) DEFAULT NULL,`blue` varchar(5) DEFAULT NULL,PRIMARY KEY (`id`)) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;At this point I wasn’t really sure if I needed the rgb values or the hex values so I decided to get everything just in case.Now, with the database ready it was time to scrape the data. I wrote the following php script making use of PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser to sort through each table row ( ) and get the text content from each table data cell ( ) and inset as a row in the database. list setColor:NSColor colorWithRed:0.996 green:0.867 blue:0 alpha:1.0 forKey:@'Pantone Yellow C';list setColor:NSColor colorWithRed:1 green:0.843 blue:0 alpha:1.0 forKey:@'Pantone Yellow 012 C';list setColor:NSColor colorWithRed:0.996 green:0.314 blue:0 alpha:1.0 forKey:@'Pantone Orange 021 C';// etc// etc// etcStage 4 – using Xcode to generate the.clr fileTo generate the final.clr file I opened Xcode and created a new project of type Cococa Application. Once this was ready I opened the AppDelegate.m file and where the comment ‘// Insert code here to initialize your application’ appeared in the – (void)applicationDidFinishLaunching:(NSNotification.)aNotification method I replaced it with the following. NSColorList.list = NSColorList.alloc initWithName:@'Pantone Coated';/. COPY AND PASTE THE GENERATED LIST OF COLORS HERE./list writeToFile: NSHomeDirectory stringByAppendingPathComponent:@'Library/Colors/';Once that was done I did a build and run and as soon as the application had launched I checked out the contents of my /Library/Colors/ folder to see a new Pantone Coated.clr file.

The next thing to do was open an app ( Sketch.app) and then open the color picker to check out the new color palette! Using Pantone swatches in Sketch ConclusionIn hindsight the way I went about this was perhaps more lengthy that it could have been. There’s no reason why I couldn’t scrape the page and generate the objective-c code all in one step missing out the database. But as I was not sure how to proceed it seemed better to store the data then work out what to do next. Anyway here’s a short example that does just that.