Comment 2 for bug 1371687

I agree the palettes should be more consistent. I just checked the Gimp palettes, and found out that in most palettes the columns value isn't set, except for the following ones:
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#grep -H -r Columns /usr/share/gimp/2.0/palettes/
/usr/share/gimp/2.0/palettes/Ega.gpl:Columns: 16
/usr/share/gimp/2.0/palettes/Named_Colors.gpl:Columns: 16
/usr/share/gimp/2.0/palettes/Web.gpl:Columns: 6
/usr/share/gimp/2.0/palettes/Visibone.gpl:Columns: 16
/usr/share/gimp/2.0/palettes/Visibone_2.gpl:Columns: 16
/usr/share/gimp/2.0/palettes/Tango.gpl:Columns: 3
/usr/share/gimp/2.0/palettes/Plasma.gpl:Columns: 16
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It seems that the default value for Gimp (when no columns is set, or when it's set to 0) is 16, and thus only web and tango have different values.

With Inkscape, we have:
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# grep -H -r Columns /usr/local/share/inkscape/palettes/
/usr/local/share/inkscape/palettes/Tango-Palette.gpl:Columns: 3
/usr/local/share/inkscape/palettes/Gray.gpl:Columns: 3
/usr/local/share/inkscape/palettes/inkscape.gpl:Columns: 3
/usr/local/share/inkscape/palettes/LaTeX-Beamer.gpl:Columns: 0
/usr/local/share/inkscape/palettes/MATLAB-Jet-72.gpl:Columns: 3
/usr/local/share/inkscape/palettes/echo-palette.gpl:Columns: 3
/usr/local/share/inkscape/palettes/Android-icon-palette.gpl:Columns: 1
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Inkscape palettes use the column value in the Palette dialog (Shift+Ctrl+W) it has no effect on the scrollable zone at the bottom of the Inkscape UI. The palettes also default to 16 columns when the value is not set (or 0).

If I understand correctly, the idea is that the column number should grow with the colors a palette has. Thus it's perfectly correct to set very low values for Echo, Android and Tango. I agree that Gray and Inkscape should have more columns, and the default value (16) should be enough (27 seems too high IMHO). For MATLAB-Jet-72, I'd favor an intermediate value (6).