magnetiq.com

Here’s a freeware tool that I had written back in 2003, shortly after reverse-engineering the Adobe Color Book Format. This command-line Windows application extracts color data from color book files and generates XML. Once the color data is safely in XML domain, the rest is up to your imagination…

If you don’t already know what color books are, there’s the Custom Colors dialog which appears when you click the Custom button on the Color Picker dialog. There, you can pick colors from a variety of color books which represent standard color catalogs by organizations like Pantone, Toyo, Trumatch, etc. The color book data is kept in files under the Presets/Color Books folder of your Photoshop installation. On Windows, they have the .acb extension.

To extract data, just pass in the filename of a color book. The resulting XML will go to standard output. To capture to a file, just redirect the output:

acb2xml focoltone.acb > focoltone.xml

For long filenames or filenames with spaces, quote the filenames:

acb2xml "PANTONE process coated.acb" > "PANTONE process coated.xml"

The resulting output will look something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<color-book version="1.0" xmlns="http://magnetiq.com/ns/2007/05/colorbook">
    <version>1</version>
    <id>0bb9</id>
    <title><![CDATA[$$$/colorbook/FOCOLTONE/title=FOCOLTONE]]></title>
    <prefix><![CDATA[$$$/colorbook/FOCOLTONE/prefix=FOCOLTONE ]]></prefix>
    <postfix><![CDATA[$$$/colorbook/FOCOLTONE/postfix=]]></postfix>
    <description><![CDATA[$$$/colorbook/FOCOLTONE/description=]]></description>
    <colors>860</colors>
    <page-size>5</page-size>
    <page-offset>2</page-offset>
    <color-space>CMYK</color-space>
    <color>
        <name>1070</name>
        <alias><![CDATA[1070  ]]></alias>
        <cyan>100</cyan>
        <magenta>0</magenta>
        <yellow>0</yellow>
        <black>0</black>
    </color>
    <color>
        <name>1071</name>
        <alias><![CDATA[1071  ]]></alias>
        <cyan>0</cyan>
        <magenta>100</magenta>
        <yellow>0</yellow>
        <black>0</black>
    </color>
    ...

ACB2XML currently supports CMYK, RGB and Lab color spaces.

Known Issues

• Some textual information is enclosed in CDATA blocks, instead of doing proper XML escaping. While this has no harm whatsoever, I may fix it in the future.

Legalese

Adobe® and Photoshop® are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated in the United States and/or other countries.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 8th, 2007 at 10:51 pm and is filed under Freeware, Photoshop. Trackback.