palettome: Hierarchy-Aware, Interactively Editable Color Palettes for Clusters

Assigns perceptually-informed color palettes to clustered data (e.g. scRNA-seq clusters / cell subtypes from 'Seurat' or plain UMAP coordinate tables), where clusters that belong to the same "family" (e.g. subtypes of T cells) can be colored either harmoniously (shared hue, varying shade) or with maximal contrast (with family membership encoded via a secondary channel). Families can be auto-detected from embedding-space hierarchical clustering or supplied explicitly, and every generated color remains individually overridable, with manual overrides preserved across regeneration. Colors are constructed in the HCL space as in Zeileis et al. (2020) <doi:10.18637/jss.v096.i01>, separated using the CIEDE2000 color difference of Sharma, Wu and Dalal (2005) <doi:10.1002/col.20070>, and checked for color-vision deficiency using the simulation of Machado, Oliveira and Fernandes (2009) <doi:10.1109/TVCG.2009.113>. Core algorithms have no UI dependencies; an optional interactive 'shiny' UI is provided separately.

Version: 1.0.1
Depends: R (≥ 4.1.0)
Imports: colorspace, farver, stats, graphics, utils, jsonlite
Suggests: knitr, rmarkdown, testthat (≥ 3.0.0), ggplot2, Seurat, shiny, plotly, colourpicker, shinyjs, dendextend
Published: 2026-10-20
DOI: 10.32614/CRAN.package.palettome (may not be active yet)
Author: Chenbin Huang ORCID iD [aut, cre]
Maintainer: Chenbin Huang <chenbin.huang at emory.edu>
BugReports: https://github.com/thisishcb/Palettome/issues
License: Apache License (== 2.0)
URL: https://github.com/thisishcb/Palettome
NeedsCompilation: no
Materials: README
CRAN checks: palettome results

Documentation:

Reference manual: palettome.html , palettome.pdf
Vignettes: Getting started with palettome (source, R code)

Downloads:

Package source: palettome_1.0.1.tar.gz
Windows binaries: r-devel: not available, r-release: not available, r-oldrel: not available
macOS binaries: r-release (arm64): palettome_1.0.1.tgz, r-oldrel (arm64): palettome_1.0.1.tgz, r-release (x86_64): palettome_1.0.1.tgz, r-oldrel (x86_64): palettome_1.0.1.tgz

Linking:

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