The Colour Key Editor

Simile can now produce displays of grid or polygon data with a wide choice of colour keys thanks to the colour key editor. It is possible to reproduce the sort of colour keys typically used in relief maps, thermographic imaging systems, weather maps and magnetic surveys. The colour key editor can be invoked from most visualization tools that can express data as colour.

As well as editing the key as described in the dialogue, it can be loaded or saved in .rgb format, which is widely used by GIS systems. Simile's examples directory contains a saved legend, 'eightbit.rgb', which generates swatches corresponding to the colours that would be converted into each integer between 0 and 255 when using the 'eight-bit colourmap' option in the image data loader. It is thus possible to view an image which was loaded as data in a grid helper, possibly after it has been altered by execution of the model.