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Syntax highlighting

Jonathan McHugh indieterminacy at libre.brussels

Mon Sep 13 09:34:14 BST 2021

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Hi mntn,

I have been wondering about the use of alttext details for formatting.

In the next couple of months I shall be experimenting with Parsing Expression Grammars. The idea is to build PEGs, using content from manpages and cheatsheets. I plan on doing it in the (regex and multidimensional array friendly) Lisp, TXR.

Hopefully it may be possible to identify when a command is being issued and deduce the format of the outputted code.

Of course, providing a switch 'sh' could open up things.

Even more so providing something with precision of software stacks may prove even more fruitful


Some ideas for a tonk client:* Reading that block and even generating an additional block with the (referenced) output below* Splitting a block containing both input commands and the outputs into seperate (and referenced) blocks

Should I make any headway Ill be sure to inform the ML.

====================Jonathan McHughindieterminacy at libre.brussels

September 12, 2021 8:14 PM, mntn at mntn.xyz wrote:

> I'm interested in opinions on syntax highlighting for preformatted text. Gemini has a lot of
> potential for distraction-free developer reference (I just discovered that godocs.io works in
> Gemini!) and syntax highlighting would help.
> 
> In Markdown, you can add hints to preformatted text blocks like so:
> 
> ```html
> <p>This is HTML</p>
> ```
> 
> This tells the client that the preformatted block is HTML, so the client can present the code in
> whatever way makes the most sense. Usually this is syntax highlighting, but I could imagine some
> clients adding collapsable code blocks based on tags, braces, and/or indentation depending on the
> language.
> 
> The Gemtext spec would seem to have no problem with this, as the first line is considered "alt
> text" and it is up to the client to determine both what should be done with it and how it should
> affect the presentation. But I wanted to put this out there to get a broader perspective.
> 
> I've started on a patch for adding this to amfora, since the chroma library (also used by Hugo) can
> do syntax highlighting with ANSI escape codes, for use in terminals. It works, but it's got a
> couple of rendering bugs at the moment. Discussion and screenshot here:
> https://github.com/makeworld-the-better-one/amfora/issues/252