Directory macros/latex/contrib/xkcdcolors

Package xkcdcolors for LaTeX

In the year 2010, Randall Munroe on posted a really fun and nice article on the iconic web of xkcd. He did a very curious experiment: showing colors to a lot of people and asking to name each one.

Afterward, he processed the data and sorted the names for each color by popularity — that means, how many people gave the same name to the same color (no guidance here! Read the post linked above for details).

He obtained a nice list of around 950 color names. It's not at all surprising that a lot of people forged CloudyBlue, but some color is really surprising, like for example BabyPoopGreen or DullPink...

DOCUMENTATION

See the included file xkcdcolors-manual.tex; you can compile it running (twice) pdflatex on it. If you want to have a look, you can find a compiled copy on the release page or on CTAN.

If you have already installed the package in your TeX distribution, use texdoc xkcdcolors; it should show you the manual of the installed version of the package.

To search for a color in a fast way, at least on Unix or on a compatible bash shell, you can use the following command:

[romano:~] % grep -i duck  $(kpsewhich xkcdcolors.sty)
    DuckEggBlue,C3FBF4;%

Links

A very interesting link about "ordering" the 900+ colors here is this one on Wolfram Community; well worth a look.

AUTHOR

Romano Giannetti romano.giannetti@gmail.com

LICENSE

This package use Randall Munroe's file rgb.txt which is distributed under CC0 1.0. You can use that license or LPPL 1.3c

SOURCE REPO

The source is hosted on GitHub. If you clone the repository, you can use

make local-install

to install the package on your local TEXMF tree.