Formatting

Highlights provides two output formats for highlighted source code, namely text/html and text/latex – both of which have been shown in previous sections of this manual. In this section we'll be describing how to go about extending Highlights formatting to support user-defined formats.

To begin we will need to import the Format module from Highlights.

using Highlights: Format, highlight

Now we need to decide on a format the we'd like to add. We'll be adding an ANSI formatter that can be used to display highlighted source code in the terminal. For that we'll need to install the Crayons package.

Pkg.add("Crayons")
using Crayons

Next we'll define a Format.render method that will be used to highlight tokenised source code using a user-provided theme.

function Format.render(io::IO, ::MIME"text/ansi", tokens::Format.TokenIterator)
    for (str, id, style) in tokens
        fg = style.fg.active ? map(Int, (style.fg.r, style.fg.g, style.fg.b)) : :nothing
        bg = style.bg.active ? map(Int, (style.bg.r, style.bg.g, style.bg.b)) : :nothing
        crayon = Crayon(
            foreground = fg,
            background = bg,
            bold       = style.bold,
            italics    = style.italic,
            underline  = style.underline,
        )
        print(io, crayon, str, inv(crayon))
    end
end

Note

The io argument to render needs to be a subtype of IO. To allow for more exotic "buffer"-like objects, such as push!ing rendered tokens to a vector one can use a custom wrapper type such as

immutable BufferWrapper <: IO
    buffer::IOBuffer
    data::Vector{RGBA{Float32}}
end

where the source needs to be written to a buffer while the colour data has to be pushed to a separate vector of colours.

To view highlighted source code in the terminal we can then just call

julia> highlight(stdout, MIME("text/ansi"), source, Lexers.JuliaLexer)