xkcd just released the results of a color survey it ran for a month. It contains many interesting, and funny, results. Specifically, it reveals a list of 949 color names with matching values that were frequently used by participants.

I’ve added the xkcd color names to my vis_color routine, so that now you can do things like this:

IDL> erase, vis_color('booger', /index, /xkcd)

You will need vis_color.pro (docs), vis_index2rgb.pro, xkcdcolors.dat, and htmlcolors.dat. The default is to use HTML color names if you don’t set the XKCD keyword. If you want the entire vis library, you can grab it via Subversion:

$ svn co http://svn.idldev.com/vis/trunk vis