Hi. There's a great web site...

http://www.personal.psu.edu/faculty/c/a/cab38/ColorBrewerBeta.html

that is designed to help you with map color selection and show you, in a variety of formats, how to specify the colors (the "HOW" works with SAS/GRAPH color specification).

Excerpt...

ColorBrewer is an online tool designed to help people select good color schemes for maps and other graphics. It is free to use, although we'd appreciate it if you could cite us if you decide to use one of our color schemes.

PS There's also very nice paper by Perry Watts that would help with your question...

http://www.nesug.org/Proceedings/nesug01/cc/cc4023.pdf

Defining colors with Precision in your SAS/GRAPH Application

Abstract The reference manual for SAS/GRAPH software contains a detailed section describing color-naming schemes. A review shows that a color can either be referenced by its NAME, RGB, or HLS code. NAME is the most intuitive, but .very pale purplish blue., coded as VPAPB, is very much in the eye of the beholder. CXC018E5 for RGB (red/ green/blue) and H017678B for HLS (hue/light/saturation) aren.t much help either. SAS provides a Tektronix Color standard for the HLS color system, but it is in varying shades of gray in the printed version of the manual!

Mike Zdeb New York State Department of Health ESP Tower - Room 1811 Albany, NY 12237 P/518-473-2855 F/630-604-1475

Roman Kolbe <roman.kolbe@VOEV To: SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU ERS.DE> cc: Sent by: "SAS(r) Subject: "runny" Colors in Proc GMAP Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.U GA.EDU>

03/19/03 09:56 AM Please respond to roman.kolbe

Hello sas-l,

I'm using PROC GMAP to visualize my data on a map of Germany (inside SAS/GRAPH). I can choose the colors by naming them directly in the pattern-Statement. See my sas-code below:

goptions reset = global colors = (YELLOW ORANGE PINK RED GREEN BLUE GREY BLACK) gunit=pct border ftext=simplex ; pattern1 color = yellow value = solid; pattern2 color = orange value = solid; pattern3 color = pink value=solid; pattern4 color = red value=solid; pattern5 color = green value=solid; pattern6 color = blue value=solid; pattern7 color = grey value =solid; pattern8 color = black value=Solid;

proc gmap map = spdstst2.germany_plz2000_wp data = spdstst2.jw_daten_wp; id plz5; choro sh_kl / discrete; run; quit;

But what I need is "runny colors", say from yellow to red, or from light grey to dark grey, so that when I have to add another pattern I don't have to change all the other pattern-statements.

Any suggestions?

Roman

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