About

Clarity, by the particle.

Claricle is an open-source image suite for publication pipelines. The name, the logo, and the color story all point at the same idea: when every pixel is checked and every format is honoured, clarity is what comes out the other side.

Etymology & symbolism

Clari- from the Latin clārus — clear, bright, famous. The same root that gives us clarity and clarify.

-cle from the Latin cle (drawn from particula) — a small particle. The same suffix as particle, fascicle, article.

Together: clear particle or bright essence. A perfect metaphor for what the suite does — validate every particle of an image so its essence passes through unchanged.

Part	Root	Meaning
`clari-`	Latin clārus	clear, bright, famous
`-cle`	Latin cle (from particula)	small particle

The logo

Five translucent circles, arranged as a flower, in the spectrum that runs upward — coral, amber, forest, sky, plum. Where they overlap, new colors emerge; the negative space at the centre is theclārus, the clear bright point that all Claricle tools aim to preserve.

Light mode

Dark mode

The logo reads as a rainbow rising — the warmer colors at the base (conformance, conversion: the work), the cooler colors at the crown (parsers, layout: the structure). The eye climbs with it.

The colors

Each spectrum color corresponds to a category in the ecosystem. The mapping is intentional: when you see coral on a project card, you know it does conformance work before you read the description.

Coral

#e56b5b

Conformance — validation libraries

Amber

#f7bc68

Conversion — format-to-format tools

Forest

#3f7f55

Page description — PS, PDF

Sky

#588ac4

Parsers — format readers

Plum

#ad89b6

Layout, diagrams, suite meta

Mist

#dddddd

Neutral surfaces & borders

Origin story

Claricle grew out of the publication pipelines that Ribose maintains for standards-development organisations. Those pipelines ingest diagrams in EMF from Windows authors, EPS from print-era designers, SVG from web tools, and PNG from everywhere — and they need to validate, convert, and re-emit each one without losing a pixel.

Existing tools either did one format well (and demanded a JVM, an Inkscape install, or a Ghostscript binary) or did many formats badly. Claricle is the answer: pure-Ruby libraries that do each format correctly, composable into any pipeline.

Mission

Make image processing in publication pipelines correct, composable, and dependency-free. Every Claricle library is pure Ruby (with a small amount of C where the performance demands it), BSD-2-Clause licensed, and tested against the formats' canonical conformance suites.

The ecosystem

Every project lives at github.com/claricle.

Conformance

Validate files against format standards.

SVG Conform — SVG conformance validation and remediation.
PNG Conform — PNG conformance checking for Ruby.

Conversion

Transform between vector and raster formats.

Vectory — Pairwise vector image conversion in pure Ruby.
EMF↔SVG — Bidirectional EMF to SVG, in pure Ruby.
PS↔SVG — Bidirectional PS / EPS to SVG, in pure Ruby.

Page description

Render PostScript and PDF documents.

PostScript — Pure-Ruby PS / EPS parser, typed model, and serializer.
Pdfrb — Pure-Ruby PDF reader, model, and serializer.

Parsers

Read and emit binary format libraries.

EMF — Pure-Ruby parser for WMF, EMF, and EMF+ metafiles.
EMF2SVG (Ruby) — Ruby bindings for libemf2svg.
libpng (Ruby) — Ruby bindings for libpng.

Layout & diagrams

Arrange diagrams and graph layouts.

ELK.rb — Eclipse Layout Kernel for Ruby.
Sirena — Diagram rendering for PlantUML and Mermaid.

Suite & resources

The umbrella gem and reference assets.

Claricle — The umbrella CLI for the Claricle image suite.

Open source

Every Claricle library is BSD-2-Clause licensed and maintained by Ribose and the broader community. Contributions are welcome — pick a project, read its CONTRIBUTING notes, and open a PR.

Get started

Pull the umbrella CLI and try it on a single file:

gem install claricle
claricle validate ./diagram.svg
claricle convert ./diagram.emf ./diagram.svg

Or pick the library that does the job you need from the ecosystem page.