I’m hacking on an existing module. In addition to new features, I’ve also created a custom panel. Everything’s working to my liking, however the colors that I picked in Inkscape are incorrect when I build/load the module in VCV.
Any ideas?
- Operating system, monitor, monitor settings (e.g. HDR), and monitor icc profile all may come into play.
- Do you have Inkscape’s Color Management setting turned on or off?
- Exactly how are they “incorrect”? Perhaps you can share some screen snippets that demonstrate specifically what you’re talking about, and the panel SVG in question.
The SVG support used by Rack (nanosvg) does not support all features of SVG, and it’s possible you may be observing an effect from that.
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Here are two screenshots. The one on the left is Inkscape, on the right is VCV.
Ignoring the buttons and jacks, the colors of the background and highlights appear more saturated in VCV.
I’m not using color management settings that I’m aware of. Eg. When I go to Document Properties / Color, I don’t see any profiles loaded.
There’s a Color Management setting in the Inkscape View menu.
Can you share the SVG?.
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Welp, Color Management is definitely turned off. Here’s the blank panel without any text labels. I recompiled with this and still saw the issue of colors being different in VCV vs. how I authored them in Inkscape.
Perhaps frustratingly, perhaps expectedly, the SVG renders in the browser closer to how it is in VCV. At this point, it’s only a minor annoyance, I’d just like to understand fricking why…
I tweaked the colors some since the previous comparison screenshots. Just so we’re not comparing pineapples to pinecones, here are updated screenshots from Inkscape and VCV respectively:
Thanks a bunch for looking at this, @pachde . I really appreciate the help
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maybe rack uses color management? two (free) apps with slightly different colors - it’s not super uncommon, I don’t think?
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Yeah, I’m pretty well ready to chalk this up to my own neuroses… 
I’m always hoping there’s someone else as mildly annoyed about tiny things that don’t really matter, with simple answers like “you forgot to turn the encabulator on!"
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I took a closer look 
and I did the following:
I loaded the screenshot from your Inkscape graphics into Gimp and checked the color of the brown rounded rectangle. The color Gimp gave me was #8c7b58.
Then I checked your screenshot from VCV in the same way and the color was #987952.
Because an SVG file is a text file, I searched your SVG file for both color numbers, and I only found #987952 seven times n the file (there are 7 elements with that particular color in your SVG).
So IMO VCV displays the SVG correctly and Inkscape does not.
Addendum: My Inkscape Version 0.92, running on Windows 10, displays colors correctly.
What’s your OS? What’s your Inkscape version?
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MacOS 14.3.1 Inkscape 1.3
Good call. Shoulda been the first thing I checked; an eyedropper on the screenshots to see who’s lying to me.
It’s worth mentioning that I switched to Inkscape after experiencing a whole host of alignment and size issues with Adobe Illustrator. I didn’t get a chance to A/B the panel colors, because everything was black or transparent. In hindsight I probably should have tried saving in an older SVG version, and checked the actual SVG code.
The VCV Module Panel Guide recommends Inkscape. Maybe upgrading Inkscape to the latest stable version 1.4 might help.
On the other hand, users run VCV on different OS and on a wide variety of monitors. So your modules surely will look different for different users.
Of course, it’s annoying get mess auround with ‘wrong’ colours while developing a panel SVG. There’s also an Inkscape User Forum for further investigation.
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The VCV Module Panel Guide recommends Inkscape.
That’s fair, and I have done so for the first iteration of my VCV panel designs. I’m also designing some Eurorack hardware panels alongside, and I started those in Illustrator for familiarity. It would be convenient to use the same application for both, so I might have to switch entirely to Inkscape for that.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Your modules surely will look different for different users.
Agreed, and easy to accept. This is all part of a learning process for me, so I wanted to ensure that I wasn’t overlooking something obvious that would make the panels appear different in different applications.
I’m satisfied with the understanding I’ve gained from this thread. Thanks all!
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fwiw, many people use software other than Inkscape to make panels. Mostly there are no problems.
This makes me wonder if Inkscape is not respecting some OS colour management that other programs are, or vice versa. It could explain the difference in colour between it and everything else.
Inkscape, at least on recent versions, has a “Color management” section in its settings. It is likely you want to configure items in there and set “Rendering intent” to “Perceptual”.