Hi all,
I recently tried writing patches in a text editor (or from scripts) and had problems getting the color settings right, for bang elements.
There is some documentation at http://puredata.info/docs/developer/fileformat with the explanation:
Color: Some graphical elements have color attributes. Per color only one signed integer value is stored that contains the three 8-bit color components (RGB). Formula to calculate color attribute values:
color = ( [red] * -65536) + ( [green] * -256) + ( [blue] * -1)
Where [red], [green], [blue] obviously represent the three color components, their values range from 0 to 255. They apply to the attributes [background color], [front color], [label color] of various elements.
I tried that, but it didn't work. Instead of showing the whole spectrum I just got different shades of blue. Also, when I opened one of my handwritten patches in PureData, looked at the color settings and saved, the resulting numbers changed. I assume that some kind of rounding is happening, and colors are actually saved in lower resolution.
Do you have any ideas?
Also, my application is a 13x13 button matrix, each triggering different chords via MIDI. The buttons should be color coded. Obviously, it's too much work setting all colors individually and I might want to create several of these patches with different colors. Maybe there is another obvious solution I didn't see.
Any help is appreciated!
(I'm using standard pd 0.42_5 on Arch Linux, but this shouldn't make a difference.)