colorlover
Color scales for IPython notebook
What it is and what it does
colorlover is a library of pre-built color scales designed for human readability and aesthetic appeal in data visualization. It bundles a collection of diverging, sequential, and qualitative color palettes and provides utility functions to work with them—converting between RGB string, numeric RGB tuple, and HSL formats, rendering scales as HTML for notebook display, and interpolating scales to arbitrary lengths.
The package is primarily oriented toward IPython notebook users and visualization workflows. It has no runtime dependencies and installs cleanly. However, it has been dormant since 2019 with no active maintenance; while the repository is still public, you should verify compatibility with your Python version and confirm the actual license before adopting it in production.
Use it for:
- Build color palettes for matplotlib or plotly charts without manually defining RGB values.
- Convert color scales between formats (RGB strings, numeric tuples, HSL) for different visualization libraries.
- Interpolate a color scale to a specific number of colors for custom data binning or heatmap generation.
- Display available color scales as interactive HTML in Jupyter notebooks for palette exploration.
Worth the install?
AI-flagged interpretation of the facts on this page — verify before relying
Provides a library of human-friendly color scales for visualization, with functions to convert between RGB, HSL, and HTML formats, and to interpolate scales to arbitrary lengths.
Yes, if you need a quick, dependency-free source of vetted color scales for visualization and don't mind the dormant maintenance status. The package is simple, has no security vulnerabilities, and installs cleanly. However, verify license terms first and test compatibility with your Python version, since it has not been actively maintained since 2019.
Install
colorlover on PyPI
pip
pip install colorloveruv
uv add colorloverpoetry
poetry add colorloverInstalling colorlover
Before you install
Installation is straightforward with no runtime dependencies. The package is dormant—last release was in 2019 and last commit in 2025, with no active maintenance signal, though the repository remains public and unarchived.
License in practice
License status is unclear; no SPDX identifier or raw license text is available in the package metadata. Verify the actual license terms before using in commercial or restricted contexts.
Quickstart
pip install colorlover
import colorlover as cl
scale = cl.scales['3']['div']['RdYlBu']
print(cl.to_numeric(scale))
Verify before relying
- Whether the package works reliably with modern Python versions despite dormant maintenance status.
- What the actual license is, given the metadata shows no license information.
Package facts
| License | not declared (unclear) |
| Python support | not specified |
| Install friction | low — pure-Python wheel |
| Runtime dependencies | none |
| Maintenance | dormant — 2,764 days since the last release |
| Last repo commit | |
| First released | |
| Downloads | 225,216/month — #9,226 on PyPI (30-day window, as of 2026-08-14) |
| Known vulnerabilities | none known (OSV.dev, checked 2026-08-14) |
Evidence: colorlover-0.3.0-py3-none-any.whl
Keywords: ipython notebook, color scales
Tags
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