Module ColorSpiral

source code

Generate RGB colours suitable for distinguishing categorical data.

This module provides a class that implements a spiral 'path' through HSV
colour space, permitting the selection of a number of points along that path,
and returning the output in RGB colour space, suitable for use with ReportLab
and other graphics packages.

This approach to colour choice was inspired by Bang Wong's Points of View
article: Color Coding, in Nature Methods _7_ 573 (doi:10.1038/nmeth0810-573).

The module also provides helper functions that return a list for colours, or
a dictionary of colours (if passed an iterable containing the names of
categories to be coloured).

Returns k colours selected by the ColorSpiral object, as a generator.

Arguments:

o k - the number of colours to return

o **kwargs - pass-through arguments to the ColorSpiral object

Returns a dictionary of colours using the provided values as keys.

Returns a dictionary, keyed by the members of iterable l, with a
colour assigned to each member.

Arguments:

o l - an iterable representing classes to be coloured

o **kwargs - pass-through arguments to the ColorSpiral object