Primary and basic colours

Enable colour by putting into the preamble \usepackage{xcolor}.

The following, along with black and white, are the core colours. They are switched in by the command \color{name}: the scope is delimited by braces or by the current environment.

• Primary colours
• red
• green
• blue
• cyan
• yellow
• magenta
• Other colours
• brown
• darkgray
• gray
• lightgray
• lime
• olive
• orange
• pink
• purple
• teal
• violet

One may produce colours between any of these by using !nn! for any percentage nn. For example, obtain a dark green with \color{green!45!black} which is a mix of 45% green and 55% black. Or perhaps obtain a pastel pink with \color{red!20!white} which is 20% red and 80% white.

Use such colours consistently

• Use black body text as any other text colour badly affects reader's comprehension (Priestly, 1991).
• Use a style file to implement colours consistently --- see mystyle.sty for example.
• In graphics use colours that have a more-or-less uniform 'intensity' (chroma), such as the solarized colours (implemented as a colormap for Matlab/Octave in solarized.m), or such as the default in post-2016 versions of Matlab.

Sixty-six more colours

Make the following 66 more colours available using \usepackage[dvipsnames]{xcolor} (thanks to Wikipedia for this table).

Name	Color		Name	Color
Apricot			Aquamarine
Bittersweet			Black
Blue			BlueGreen
BlueViolet			BrickRed
Brown			BurntOrange
CadetBlue			CarnationPink
Cerulean			CornflowerBlue
Cyan			Dandelion
DarkOrchid			Emerald
ForestGreen			Fuchsia
Goldenrod			Gray
Green			GreenYellow
JungleGreen			Lavender
LimeGreen			Magenta
Mahogany			Maroon
Melon			MidnightBlue
Mulberry			NavyBlue
OliveGreen			Orange
OrangeRed			Orchid
Peach			Periwinkle
PineGreen			Plum
ProcessBlue			Purple
RawSienna			Red
RedOrange			RedViolet
Rhodamine			RoyalBlue
RoyalPurple			RubineRed
Salmon			SeaGreen
Sepia			SkyBlue
SpringGreen			Tan
TealBlue			Thistle
Turquoise			Violet
VioletRed			White
WildStrawberry			Yellow
YellowGreen			YellowOrange