MapPoint has a fixed palette of 45 colours for user-defined pushpins and drawings (polygons, polylines, etc). Although you can pass it a colour in full 256*256*256 colour space, the closest colour in the palette will be chosen.
This is described in the help, and the colours are included in a bitmap that comes with a standard install.

Has anyone done any work with these colours? Eg. ways to organise them or perhaps produced a color selector dialog box?

I have the hex values of the colours listed out. Next I need to create a dialog box to manipulate them, but I'm trying to find some pattern or way of organising things! Perhaps there's an article for Eric in all of this?

Richard

Have you seen this page?

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/de...olorScheme.asp

No I don't think I have (or if I have it was a long time ago!) - thanks!

I'd seen the similar pages about the different colours for pushpins and polygons.

Using the standard colour schemes as options is a good idea. I'll have other options including a larger predefined colormap or two, and a full colour map editor eventually.

This is for a grid program I'm working on - hope to have an early pre-release out later this week. Somewhere in the late alpha/early beta stage. A few features missing, but main functions up and running.


Richard

Well, started to work with this properly and there are a couple of problems.

The first is that the image in the samples directory that gives the standard 45 colours isn't quite right. I've read the colours into my code, and five of them come up as duplicates when I try to draw MapPoint polygons with them.
For the record, they are: (RGB, byte components)

0x57,0x92,0x05 and 0x79,0xA8,0x38 both duplicate 0x80,0x80,0x00
(2 greens appear as a "muddy" colour aka dk yellow)

0x9B,0xBE,0x6A duplicates a pale grey (0x96,0x96,0x96)
0xBD,0xD4,0x9C duplicates palest grey (0xC0,0xC0,0xC0)

0xFB,0xFB,0xAB duplicates 0xFF,0xFF,0x99 (pale yellows)

5 duplicates, gives us 40 unique colours.


The next 'problem' is my attempt to duplicate MapPoint's internal colour schemes. This is flawed because these schemes use a wider range of colours than the deliberately limited "user colours".
(they're deliberately limited to minimise clashes and palette problems).

So I'm just going to come up with a handful of my own colour schemes.
Eventually the program I'm working on will allow the user to design their own colormap.

Richard