# Adding some ParaView colors to vtkNamedColors
**URL:** https://discourse.vtk.org/t/adding-some-paraview-colors-to-vtknamedcolors/16220
**Category:** Development
**Created:** [January 10, 2026, 5:48am UTC](https://discourse.vtk.org/t/adding-some-paraview-colors-to-vtknamedcolors/16220 "2026-01-10T05:48:20Z")
**Posts on this page:** 8
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@amaclean](https://discourse.vtk.org/u/amaclean)
#### Post date: [January 10, 2026, 5:48am UTC](https://discourse.vtk.org/t/adding-some-paraview-colors-to-vtknamedcolors/16220/1 "2026-01-10T05:48:20Z")
ParaView has two nicely balanced and really useful background colors that now appear quite a lot in the VTK Examples, namely _ParaViewBlueGrayBkg_ and _ParaViewWarmGrayBkg_.
What do people think about adding these colors to those already available in [vtkNamedColors](https://vtk.org/doc/nightly/html/classvtkNamedColors.html)?
This would also leave it open for any other ParaView specific colors to be added later.
Have a look at this PDF to see how the list of available colors would look with these colors added:
[VTKNamedColorPatches (1).pdf](https://discourse.vtk.org/uploads/short-url/5O3V0LYLDHl78Q6jdijszl4Qrse.pdf) (117.9 KB)
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### Author:  [@will.schroeder](https://discourse.vtk.org/u/will.schroeder)
#### Post date: [January 10, 2026, 12:24pm UTC](https://discourse.vtk.org/t/adding-some-paraview-colors-to-vtknamedcolors/16220/2 "2026-01-10T12:24:54Z")
I love that PDF! Fantastic… remind me again, what are the synonyms and why are they needed?
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### Author:  [@amaclean](https://discourse.vtk.org/u/amaclean)
#### Post date: [January 10, 2026, 9:57pm UTC](https://discourse.vtk.org/t/adding-some-paraview-colors-to-vtknamedcolors/16220/3 "2026-01-10T21:57:56Z")
I just used [docupilot](https://www.docupilot.com/tools/html-to-pdf) to convert the html to pdf. The html document has a page break command, which is ignored when viewed directly but picked up in the pdf document or when printing the html document - nice!
The synonyms refer to the fact that the some of the VTK color names (originally in colors.tcl - deleted from the repository in 2017, but saved as Wrapping/Python/vtkmodules/util/colors.py) have the same color as those of the Web colors. For example **Silver** in the Web colors is the same as **grey** in the VTK colors. I should add a comment along these lines to the index.
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### Author:  [@amaclean](https://discourse.vtk.org/u/amaclean)
#### Post date: [January 10, 2026, 10:12pm UTC](https://discourse.vtk.org/t/adding-some-paraview-colors-to-vtknamedcolors/16220/4 "2026-01-10T22:12:50Z")
Here is another PDF of the VTK Color Series that I also find useful:
[VTKColorSeriesPatches (1).pdf](https://discourse.vtk.org/uploads/short-url/gB3O2CPj45hUKEJBOzG2ONfMHTP.pdf) (72.5 KB)
Whilst the HTML versions occur in the top level of the VTK Examples repository you need to download them to view them. I could also put PDF versions there.
In the case of VTK Examples I could possibly add a download link like we do for the VTKBookLaTeX entry in the index.
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### Author:  [@amaclean](https://discourse.vtk.org/u/amaclean)
#### Post date: [January 11, 2026, 7:43am UTC](https://discourse.vtk.org/t/adding-some-paraview-colors-to-vtknamedcolors/16220/5 "2026-01-11T07:43:29Z")
Yes, we can display/download the HTML and PDF files, see: [VTKNamedColorPatches](https://ajpmaclean.github.io/web-test/site/ColorNamesAndPatches/VTKNamedColorPatches/) on my test site. I’m using Google Chrome and it also works on Firefox.
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### Author:  [@amaclean](https://discourse.vtk.org/u/amaclean)
#### Post date: [January 12, 2026, 5:10am UTC](https://discourse.vtk.org/t/adding-some-paraview-colors-to-vtknamedcolors/16220/6 "2026-01-12T05:10:15Z")
The links have changed to:
- [Color Names used in VTK](https://ajpmaclean.github.io/web-test/site/ColorNamesSeries/ColorNamePatches/)
- [Color Series used in VTK](https://ajpmaclean.github.io/web-test/site/ColorNamesSeries/ColorSeriesPatches/)
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### Author:  [@amaclean](https://discourse.vtk.org/u/amaclean)
#### Post date: [January 13, 2026, 3:27am UTC](https://discourse.vtk.org/t/adding-some-paraview-colors-to-vtknamedcolors/16220/7 "2026-01-13T03:27:06Z")
This MR: [https://gitlab.kitware.com/vtk/vtk/-/merge\_requests/12804](https://gitlab.kitware.com/vtk/vtk/-/merge_requests/12804) adds the ParaView background colors to vtkNamedColors and also fixes links that never worked for both vtkNamedColors and vkColorSeries.
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### Author:  [@amaclean](https://discourse.vtk.org/u/amaclean)
#### Post date: [January 14, 2026, 9:15pm UTC](https://discourse.vtk.org/t/adding-some-paraview-colors-to-vtknamedcolors/16220/8 "2026-01-14T21:15:57Z")
All done and merged. You now have links to PDF and HTML pages of color names and patches from [vtkNamedColors](https://vtk.org/doc/nightly/html/classvtkNamedColors.html) and the color series patches from [vtkColorSeries](https://vtk.org/doc/nightly/html/classvtkColorSeries.html). Additionally there are links to the code used to generate the HTML pages. See the **Detailed Description** sections.