Yes, this was a design decision long ago. I think the letter colors are similar to Matlab's, and intended to work well when used for thin lines, both in print and on the screen.

There is some mailing list discussion here:

http://matplotlib.1069221.n5.nabble.com/matplotlib-colors-vs-html-colors-td25679.html

Assuming we decide to leave "as-is" (which I think is where I'm falling on this), should we document this somewhere? It seems like a minor and distracting detail to point out in a tutorial, but maybe we should do something (as this does seem to pop up as a question now and again). Maybe we do this in an FAQ (and revive and update our FAQ page while we're at it).

How about producing a plot with all of the named colors in matplotlib? It doesn't have to go in the gallery, but could instead go in http://matplotlib.org/api/colors_api.html

@pelson There was a website somewhere, I think it was the scipy cookbook, that did this for all the colour maps.

Here it is.

I think it was the scipy cookbook, that did this for all the colour maps.

Our gallery also does this. The key is there is no plot of all the available colors (not colormaps).

In my tutorial, I provided a link from w3c schools for the list of HTML
colors, also noting that either spelling of "gray" is allowed.

Ben Root
On Jun 29, 2013 11:23 AM, "Phil Elson" notifications@github.com wrote:

I think it was the scipy cookbook, that did this for all the colour maps.

Our gallery also does this. The key is there is no plot of all the
available colors (not colormaps).

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com//issues/2164#issuecomment-20232671
.

The key is there is no plot of all the available colors (not colormaps).

Yes. We are in agreement, but I don't think I expressed what I was trying to say very clearly.

We should have something in our gallery that plots all the colours with their names. The scipy cookbook (and also our gallery) already does this in the case of colour maps and I was trying to say we should use that as inspiration.

I agree. That would be a nice addition. I'm milestoning this for 1.3.x, as I think it's a reasonably small project that doesn't impact the core at all.

That was 3 months ago, with no action, so I am moving it up to 1.4. I hope we don't need any more 1.3 releases.

Is something like this what you where thinking about?
Of course there are problems with some names overlapping, and I don't know how to order them (sorted by color value maybe).
If it is, I will add examples/color/named_colors.py

Maybe calculate the hsv, and sort first on hue, then on saturation, then on value?

The sorted version....

Thi can be closed #2801