Full documentation is available here.

• Project motivation
• Building and installing
• Credits and dependencies

🌈 Project motivation

Making scientific data and visualizations accessible to as many people as possible is clearly an excellent goal. However, everyone has different aesthetic preferences, and sacrificing visual appeal for accessibility is not generally necessary. If you have found that you are unsatisfied or bored with existing perceptually uniform colormaps, this project may be what you need.

🔩 Building and installing

To build and install this package with pip, the same procedure can be followed as for most pure Python packages that use setuptools. In the install step, some optional flags are given below in brackets that can be useful for a non-root build (--user) or for active development (--ignore-installed --force-reinstall), but these are not strictly necessary to install the package itself.

pip3 install [--force-reinstall --ignore-installed] [--user] git+https://github.com/emprice/sandman.git@main

💎 Credits and dependencies

This package depends on several packages not in the Python standard library, including the following.

• NumPy and SciPy are instrumental for optimizing colormaps and working with the numeric data efficiently.
• colorspacious is used for modeling human vision perception.
• webcolors is used for parsing hexadecimal color strings, which is currently the only recognized user-facing input format.

The command-line tool further relies on the following extra dependencies.

• Matplotlib and Pillow are needed for previewing and simulating the colormaps.
• pronounceable is used for generating random, but pronounceable, colormap names when maps are generated in bulk.

Finally, the following dependencies deserve special recognition for their use in the HTML documentation.

• Furo is the base theme used in conjunction with Sphinx to build the documentation pages.
• The Nord colorscheme is a beautiful set of color palettes with a frosty blue feel. The documentation colors and example colormaps are based on these colors.