Be sure to swap out the file.acb file name with the right name for your ACB file. You can name the XML file whatever you like. AutoCAD Color Book files use the ACB extension, too. Files of this type store collections of colors that the AutoCAD computer-aided design software can use to fill in surfaces and lines. They’re useful for creating a template of colors that a company can use across all of their designs. ACB is also the extension used for an archive file format utilized by AOL for software installations. ACB, in this case, stands for AOL Cab Launcher.
How to Open an ACB File
Adobe Photoshop Color Book ACB files are used with Adobe Photoshop, as well as Adobe’s InDesign and Illustrator software programs. Photoshop stores several ACB files in its default installation directory under the folder \Presets\Color Books. Some of the color catalogs included with Photoshop are FOCOLTONE, HKS, TRUMATCH, TOYO, and PANTONE. To use one of these ACB files, or any other in the folder mentioned above, open Photoshop’s Color Picker tool (from either the foreground or the background color swatch on the Tools panel; it’s the tool with the two overlapping colors). Choose the button called Color Libraries and then select the ACB file from the Book: drop-down menu. Autodesk AutoCAD opens the AutoCAD Color Book ACB files used by that program. You can create your own ACB file for AutoCAD using the AutoCAD Color Book Editor. Just place the ACB files in the \Support\Color\ folder of AutoCAD’s installation directory. AutoCAD Color Book files are stored in the XML format, which means you can use any text editor to see the RGB values for each color. As for AOL Cab Launcher files, it’s likely that it’s just an archive format, like ZIP or RAR, that AOL software utilizes during a program’s installation phase. If you think your ACB file is used for this purpose, you can try to open it with a file extraction utility like 7-Zip.
How to Convert an ACB File
The free command-line tool ACB2XML for Windows can generate an XML file from an Adobe Photoshop Color Book file so that you can see each color book’s lightness and chrominance values. To do this, once you’ve downloaded and extracted ACB2XML to its own folder, execute this command in this manner from the same folder: Be sure to swap out the file.acb file name with the right name for your ACB file. You can name the XML file whatever you like.
