Continuous Color Tables

An example of a color table that defines a transition from blue to red:

% Continuous

0 0 1

1 0 0

Each line, from left to right, contains the red, green, and blue components (RGB) of a color. The components are floating-point values between 0 and 1. The table can contain an arbitrary number of colors.

Each color can contain an optional fourth component, the length of the interval between the two colors. For N colors, there are N−1 intervals. An example of a color scale that defines a sharp transition from blue to magenta followed by a slow transition from magenta to red:

% Continuous

0 0 1 1

0.5 0 0.5 10

1 0 0