Palette matched to pen colors

[Shel]

Hi…
For a multi-color plot, choosing a pen color can be a daunting task. Ideally you would like to be able to make Inkscape show your actual pen colors in its palette. After choosing your desired color, you need a way to go from that palette entry to the actual corresponding physical pen.

I have manually made palettes the laborious way: Identify individual pens with labels, draw small swatches of each onto white paper, scan the resulting image, normalize colors, blur the color swatches, transcribe their RGB values into a text file compatible with the Inkscape format, sort the colors by hue and brightness, then make tool-tips that reference each pen’s identifying label.

A major nuisance to do, but well worth it for the subsequent ease of choosing appropriate pen colors for my eggbot drawings.

As a programmer I would enjoy the task of automating this procedure. As a lazy programmer, I would prefer to use an existing program. Long way of asking two questions:
1. Does such an integrated, semi-automated solution already exist?
2. Would people other then myself find such a program useful?

…Shel

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