*! version 1.0.0 21MAR2016

Command to look up meta characteristics for colors/palettes available to brewscheme

help for brewmeta

brewmeta -- A Stata interface to color property palettes developed
by Cynthia Brewer (Color Brewer).

Syntax

brewmeta palette name, colorid(integer)
[ colors(integer) properties("", "all", "colorblind", "lcd", "print", "photocopy", "meta") ]

Description

brewmeta is used to look-up the available meta data on the
"friendliness" properties of the various color palettes and includes an option
to look up those meta data on the fly.

Options

colorid is a required argument indicating the number of the colors
within the palette for which you would like to know about the meta data
properties. For additional control, users may specify a specific number of colors
within a palette to look up these values.

colors is an optional argument indicating the maximum number of
colors from the specified palette from which to look up the properties of the
color identified by colorid. If no value is passed to this argument, the
maximum number of colors available in the palette are assumed. Note: this is particularly important for divergent color palettes where colors may be added/subtracted from the palette in order to preserve balance across the palette.

properties is an optional arguement used to look up a specific property for the
color palette. If nothing is specified, the program will assume you would like
to see the results for all of the properties. The table below illustrates the
types of results that can be expected to be retrieved from this functionality:

Argument Result

all* Displays all information below

colorblind* Colorblind friendliness indicator

lcd* LCD friendliness indicator

print* Print friendliness indicator

photocopy* Photocopier friendliness indicator

meta* Additional information about colors/palette

* Information is displayed if available for the given color/palette

Examples

Determine if a color palette with 9 colors (of a potential 12 total)
from the paired ColorBrewer palette is colorblind, lcd, print, or photocopy
friendly and also identify the type of scale the palette is used for:

brewmeta "paired", colorid(9) colors(12)

Using a 15" early 2013 MacBook Pro w/Retina with a 2.8 GHz Intel Core
i7 chipset, 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3, and Intel HD Graphics 4000 1024 MB graphics
card running Stata MP8, the command will typically take < 5 seconds with a
decent Wi-Fi connection. The first time the look up table is built and when the
refresh option are used, you should expect to see the performance dip slightly.
Look ups take < 1 second on my system and will likely take a similar amount of
time on others as well.

References

Bostock, M., Ogievetsky, V., & Heer, J. (2011). D3: data driven documents. IEEE Transactions on Visualization & Computer Graphics. 17(12) pp 2301 - 2309. Retrieved from
Stanford Vis Group.

Brewer, C. A. (2002) Color Brewer 2 [Computer Software]. State College, PA: Cynthia Brewer, Mark Harrower, and The Pennsylvania State University.

Lin, S., Fortuna, J., Kulkarni, C., Stone, M., & Heer, J. (2013). Selecting Semantically-Resonant Colors for Data Visualization. In
Computer Graphics Forum (Vol. 32, No. 3pt4, pp. 401-410). Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

License

Please view section 4
of the ColorBrewer copyright notice for additional information pertaining to the licensing and redistribution of ColorBrew intellectual property.

Author

William R. Buchanan, Ph.D.

Data Scientist

Minneapolis Public Schools

William.Buchanan at mpls [dot] k12 [dot] mn [dot] us