Pre-defined color cycles à la RColorBrewer?

This is an edit of Stefan Pinnow:

Jake is referring to a non-PGFPlots/external colorbrewer library of (I guess LoopSpace). For the PGFPlots/internal colorbrewer library please have a look at my answer.

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There is now a PGFPlots library colorbrewer that creates cycle lists using the colorbrewer color schemes. The color values are taken from the ColorBrewer Excel file.

To set a colorbrewer cycle list, you call colorbrewer cycle list=<scheme>, which will define the necessary colors (colorbrewer1 to colorbrewer8) and create a cycle list called colorbrewer.

The number of colors and plot styles that are defined can be set using the key colorbrewer values=<number>.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{pgfplots}   
\usepgfplotslibrary{colorbrewer}

\begin{document}

\begin{tikzpicture}
\begin{axis}[
    colorbrewer cycle list=Dark2
]
\addplot {rnd};
\addplot {rnd-1};
\addplot {rnd-2};
\addplot {rnd-3};
\addplot {rnd-4};
\addplot {rnd-5};
\addplot {rnd-6};
\addplot {rnd-7};
\end{axis}
\end{tikzpicture}

\end{document}  

Here's an overview of the color schemes:

Just for the record

Since v1.13 PGFPlots provides the ColorBrewer color schemes itself in the corresponding library colorbrewer. Because I don't want to repeat the manual I want to refer to it. It are only 4 pages to read and about two of them consist of images from what I'll repeat some of them here.

Edit

In the meantime I have answered several questions where I used the colorbrewer library. Here are some of them you can study, if you don't want to read the manual or have some practical code to play with:

• questions regarding cycle lists

  • colorbrewer with pgfplot 1.15
  • colorbrewer cycle list not showing markers
  • How can I reverse a cycle list in pgfplots?
  • Plot a stacked bar plot with specialised x axis range

• questions regarding colormaps

  • Diverging color scale for a table heatmap
  • pgfplots - surf - Standard color schemes
  • PGFPlots 3D: cannot use most of the colormaps for the interior colormap
  • GIS layer maps from .dat files and not figures

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