Roberts, Richard C.McNabb, LiamAlHarbi, NaifLaramee, Robert S.{Tam, Gary K. L. and Vidal, Franck2018-09-192018-09-192018978-3-03868-071-0https://diglib.eg.org:443/handle/10.2312/cgvc20181218https://doi.org/10.2312/cgvc.20181218The use of colour mapping is fundamental to visualisation research. It acts as an additional layer beyond rendering in the spatial dimensions and provides a link between values in any dataset. When designing and building visualisation research software, the process of creating and managing a colour mapping system can be time-consuming and complex. Existing alternatives offer niche features and require complex dependencies or installations. We present Spectrum; an open source colour map management library that is developer friendly with no installation required, and that offers a wide variety of features for the majority of use cases. We demonstrate the utility of the library through simple snippets of code and a number of examples which illustrate its ease of use and functionality, as well as a video demonstrating the installation and use of the library in under two minutes. It is a very valuable jump-start tool for developers and researchers who need to focus on other tasks.Software and its engineeringSoftware libraries and repositoriesSoftware design engineeringOpen source model10.2312/cgvc.20181218135-141