GNOME Color Browser manual
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# Colors in X Window System

In X Window system, each color is described by 3 numbers, namely the contents of Red, Green and Blue (as is well known, every color can be obtained by combining these three primary colors). These 3 values are commonly called the RGB values. Usually each of them is allowed to range from 0 to 255; for example, triple (0,0,0) is black, (255,0,0) is pure red, and (255, 255, 255) is white.

The total number of possible colors is thus 256×256×256=224=16,777,216. Of course, whether or not your system is actually able to show that many different colors depends on the configuration of X Window system, which is limited by the capabilities of your video card. Most modern video cards are capable of showing all these colors; some older cards will only be able to use 216=64,536 (colordepth 16) or even 28=256 (colordepth 8) colors. In this case, X Window System will still use triples like (234, 112, 243) for describing RGB values, but some of these triples will produce identical colors. More information about colors can be found in the manual page for X.

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