Scale numbers to be <= 255?

Question

I have cells for whom the numeric value can be anything between 0 and Integer.MAX_VALUE. I would like to color code these cells correspondingly.

If the val

Answer 1

The best answer really depends on the behavior you want.

If you want each cell just to generally have a color different than the neighbor, go with what akf said in the second paragraph and use a modulo (x % 256).

If you want the color to have some bearing on the actual value (like "blue means smaller values" all the way to "red means huge values"), you would have to post something about your expected distribution of values. Since you worry about many low values being zero I might guess that you have lots of them, but that would only be a guess.

In this second scenario, you really want to distribute your likely responses into 256 "percentiles" and assign a color to each one (where an equal number of likely responses fall into each percentile).