A plugin with color and style
High-Light is a RapidWeaver plugin aimed at the user who wants to include sourcecode on his webpages. This plugin extends the available formatting options for Styled Text areas in RapidWeaver. It generates properly syntax colored, or CSS tagged, XHTML output for text pasted into a Styled Text area that is marked with High-Light. It also preserves the intendation of the marked text is so that the output is generated as close to the original text as possible. Additional options available is that linenumbers can be automatically generated.
Basics
High-Light works as a frontend for the GNU source-highlight command line application that is written by Lorenzo Bettini <http://www.lorenzobettini.it>. This command is now bundled within the High-Light plugin so you do not have to install that separately. High-Light still supports the use of an external version of source-highlight if you have your own version that you still want to use.
Requirements
High-Light has the same system requires as RapidWeaver 3.5, i.e. it should work on any Mac, both PowerPC and Intel, running OS X 10.3.9 or greater. Although it is not actively supported it should also work together with RapidWeaver 3.2.1.
Where do I find it
The “High-Light” menu is the heart of this plugin. This is where you apply all formatting and configure the output. The language formatting options from High-Light is directly available in a new submenu that is added to the “Format” menu in RapidWeaver.
-
Settings - Opens the settings dialogue where you can configure High-Light.
- Help - Open the latest published version of the User Manual.
- Line numbers - Adds/Removes the linenumber option from the currently selected High-Lighted area.
- C++, Caml etc. - These are the different formatting languages you can choose. The menu present in this picture is for source-highlight v1.x. If you are using v2.x more languages are available. See the chapter “GNU source-highlight” for a brief description of the supported languages.
A simple example how High-Light can be used
Using High-Light is as simple as applying any other formatting on the styled text page. There is nothing fancy about it at all and you will soon appreciate how simple it can be to include code snippets on your webpages.
You start with writing or pasting some
text on the page…
…then you select the text that you want
to High-Light…
…apply a language format from the
High-Light menu.
That is all it takes to have a piece of text/code
formatted and high-lighted on your page. If you
want to add/remove linenumbering from one
particular high-lighted text that is also simple.
Either mark all of the text again or just place
the cursor inside the area and goto the
“High-Light” menu and toggle the
“Line numbers” option.
Below are two examples on how the code
snippet above would render inside “Code”
tags in the standard Aqualicious theme in
RapidWeaver.
The result, without linenumbers…
…and with linenumbers.
High-Light settings
There are a number of settings that the user can configure in High-Light. These settings are divided into global settings, which affects all places where you use High-Light in any project, and default settings that affects the next place where you use High-Light.
Global settings:
- Apply inline color CSS - Enable this option if you want High-Light to add inline CSS to the generated output. This uses the default color formatting from source-highlight. If you want to style the colors yourself you should disable this option. For instructions on how the generated output is tagged see the source-highlight documentation.
- Wrap text inside - Define which tag that should be used to wrap the generated output in.
- Replace tabs with spaces - Define the number of spaces that High-Light should apply to the output when it detects a tab in the text. Since tabs are not obeyed in HTML High-Light replaces them with hard-spaces instead.
- Pad linenumbers - Define how High-Light should pad the linenumbers. You can select between spaces (default) or zeros.
Default settings:
- Add linenumbers - Enable this option if you want High-Light to add linenumbers by default. This option can be changed manually on every place where you have applied High-Light.
High-Light comes bundled with source-highlight. But if you want to use a specific version instead you can do that by specifying where High-Light can find the binary.
High-Light setup:
- Use external binary - Enable this option if you want to use another version of source-highlight that the one bundled with High-Light. Use the browse button to locate the binary.
- Use dynamic menu - Enable this if you want to see the full list of supported languages in the High-Light menu. Recent versions of source-highlight has a long list of languages that will create a very long menu in High-Light. In order to shorten this menu a trunkated list of languages containing the most use ones is available.