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Quoting "Christopher B. Wright" <wrightc@...537...>:
If my original response seemed a bit crisp, I apologize for that -- it wasn't intended to be. But I beg to differ with some of the specifics of your, ah, equally crisp retort. Adobe refers to the tool as a Swatches *palette*:
But if we're talking about industry standards, "Color Palette" is used by Windows, KDE and Gnome (don't know about Apple) and the term "palette" is *still* used by Adobe and Macromedia even though they've replaced "color" with "swatches."
That's quite a mix of different disciplines, and the word palette can mean two different things:
1) a dockable, tabbed user interface element
2) the set of colors used in an image
Adobe and Macromedia are using "palette" in sense 1).
The only places I normally collections of colors called "palettes" in the specific color-oriented sense are:
1) non-artistic situations like APIs (X11/Windows/KDE/Gnome) and file formats [programming]
2) some (mostly bitmap-oriented) graphics programs, by analogy with...
3) painting [fine art]
In turn, as a graphic designer, I'm most accustomed to chosing amongst colors and patterns via things I call "swatches" (whether electronically or in the physical world).
Generally Inkscape's UI terminology is drawn from that of graphic design rather than fine arts or programming (at least when we have alternatives to choose amongst).
-mental