title: Is there a better color scale than the "rainbow" colormap?
body: <p>I am plotting a series of curves in x, y space, where each curve is identified by a scalar value z. I wish to map the z value to color for each line, but most colormaps / color tables are constructed with images in mind (e.g. on a white backround, the grayscale colormap hides one extreme of z).</p>
  
  <p>The rainbow/spectral/jet colormap - which is the default in many plotting programs - is better, but suffers from poor visibility for the yellow/cyan lines on white backgrounds, and poor color contrast among the blue/cyan/green colors. Borland and Taylor further discuss this and other problems with the rainbow colormap:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li><a href="http://wayback.archive.org/web/20131019161245/http://www.sv.vt.edu/~rkriz/Projects/create_color_table/color_07.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Borland and Taylor, "Rainbow Color Map (Still) Considered Harmful," IEEE (2007). [pdf]</a></li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>Can someone recommend something better? Some aspects I'm looking for:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>High visibility for all colors against a white background</li>
  <li>Intuitive perceptual ordering (red-yellow-blue makes more sense than red-blue-yellow)</li>
  <li>Good <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromaticity" rel="nofollow noreferrer">chromaticity</a> contrast between colors</li>
  </ol>
  
  <hr>
  
  <p>Edit/update: per endolith's request, here's a simplified sample plot:
  <img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/Lju4R.png" alt="sample plot with gray and jet colormaps">
  The "gray" colormap and it's relatives (starting at black and ending at white) are designed for images, however when used to plot lines or points on a white background, some will be hard to see or invisible. The "jet" colormap and it's spectral relatives typically also have a yellow, green, or other color that is hard to see on a white background.</p>