Friday 6/18/2004
Design, Implementation

A number of individuals have posted on their sites handy Pantone Matching System (PMS) to RGB color conversion charts. A freshly-minted example of such a chart has made the blog circuit recently (but I’ve lost the link already). Since there are so many PMS colors, even the standards-based online PMS charts can be hefty downloads.

Poking around the net, I found one such chart that seemed official, it being Pantone branded and all (sorry, lost it just as fast). It was a pretty simple matter to use a regular expression to strip the color names and their RGB approximations out of the HTML and slap ‘em into a JSON object, then write a little script to crawl that object and write some simple XHTML to display a panel of swatches.

You can grab it at http://jonplummer.com/misc/pms.html . I suspect I’ll be making this prettier (and searchable, etc.) later, but at the moment it is reasonably useful, and a svelte 24KB (as opposed to the 240KB or so of many other examples). I’d love to hear your ideas about how to make this set of swatches more useful.