Creating .ACB (Color Book) file from .ACO (swatches) file

i was able to do this for >3000 colors relatively easily. you can source the color book info from many places. if you were doing pantone or something like that you could query all potential combinations of this URL https://www.pantone.com/media/wysiwyg/color-finder/img/pantone-color-chip-101-c.webp and filter responses to only show images that respond with X-Cache: HIT, HIT (not X-Cache: MISS, MISS), writing the successful links to a .csv file, wget the image links in csv to a directory, then run imagemagick against that directory to create a 3-5 depth histogram of the webp images, sort histogram by most occuring and use regex to get the individual RGB values for the most occuring color which you could then use to build your own color book later on, or just store the hex value, or whatever value you want. example of unfiltered imagemagick histogram response: 

          6442: (25,25,25) #191919 srgb(25,25,25)
          1832: (184,183,164) #B8B7A4 srgb(184,183,164)
         88526: (254,254,254) #FEFEFE srgb(254,254,254)
        193600: (255,215,1) #FFD701 srgb(255,215,1)

Building a color book: 
Download and unzip this. 
https://github.com/atesgoral/acb

In the main directory, create a json file with your specs, save it as data.json with RGB, CMYK or Lab values as numbers (below example is in RGB so RGB values are used, separated by comma separated lines in the "components" section): 

{
   "id":3057,
   "title":"TitleOfYourBook",
   "colorNamePrefix":"",
   "colorNamePostfix":"",
   "description":"Description not visible or used anywhere practical",
   "pageSize":7,
   "pageKey":4,
   "colorModel":"RGB",
   "colors":[
      {
         "name":"Spot Color Name 1",
         "code":"000001",
		 "spotProcessIdentifier":"spflspot",
         "components":[
            50,
            46,
            32
         ]
      },
      {
         "name":"Spot Color Name 2",
         "code":"000002",
         "components":[
            33,
            39,
            32
         ]
      }
   ]
}

 
edit encode-acb.js to: 

const fs = require('fs');
const { encodeAcb } = require('@atesgoral/acb');

// Specify the path to your JSON file containing the ACB data
const jsonFilePath = 'data.json'; // Update with your file path

// Read the JSON file
fs.readFile(jsonFilePath, 'utf8', (err, data) => {
    if (err) {
        console.error('Error reading JSON file:', err);
        return;
    }

    try {
        const acbData = JSON.parse(data);

        // Encode ACB data
        const acbBuffer = Buffer.concat([...encodeAcb(acbData)]);

        // Write the ACB buffer to a file
        fs.writeFileSync('TitleOfYourBook.acb', acbBuffer);

        console.log('ACB file generated successfully: mybook.acb');
    } catch (error) {
        console.error('Error parsing JSON or encoding to ACB:', error);
    }
});

 make sure node.js is installed. start a powershell or command in that directory and type node encode-acb.js. your colorbook should now be in the directory. 

To change all colors to spot colors, open your .acb file in a binary hex editor https://hexed.it/ and edit the last 8 bits (scroll all the way down and replace letters on right side) from spflproc to spflspot. you now have a spot color library. 

EDIT: you have to use Lab colors from the gitgo to make an accurate spot color library. you cant just write spflspot at the end of the acb hex file. 

Hi Julien,

Can you give me some Idea about creating the color books from scratch.