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#5860 closed Feature Requests (fixed)

Coloring text in Quickbook

Reported by:	Paul A. Bristow	Owned by:	Daniel James
Milestone:	To Be Determined	Component:	quickbook
Version:	Boost Development Trunk	Severity:	Cosmetic
Keywords:	Quickbook color	Cc:

Description

It would be rather nice to be able to color specified text items (like [*bold]) when writing layout in Quickbook. Perhaps some syntax like

This should be in red.

where ? is some squiggle, and the color names are in the list of HTML colors.

or This should be in purple.

where ? is some squiggle, and the hex values is the RGB color.

(But though I can't really see a real need for the full gamut of colors, hex format RGB might be simpler to implement?)

Change History (11)

follow-up: 2 comment:1 by Daniel James, 11 years ago

Docbook has no support for colours, see:

http://cygwin.com/ml/docbook/2005-05/msg00040.html

A possiblity is to have a tag to allow text to be marked up with a role (as we do for syntax highlighting). That can be coloured for web pages in css, but you'd have to work out how to colour that for pdfs, which appears to be done in tools/boostbook/xsl/fo.xsl. I'd prefer to have semantic roles rather than presentational. Any additions to the roles supported in that file should probably be mentioned on the list first.

? isn't available as it's already used for conditional phrases. I wouldn't want to use up an punctuation for this. There are only so many characters available, I don't want to waste them.

in reply to: 1 comment:2 by Paul A. Bristow, 11 years ago

Replying to danieljames:

Docbook has no support for colours, see:

http://cygwin.com/ml/docbook/2005-05/msg00040.html

A possiblity is to have a tag to allow text to be marked up with a role (as we do for syntax highlighting). That can be coloured for web pages in css, but you'd have to work out how to colour that for pdfs, which appears to be done in tools/boostbook/xsl/fo.xsl. I'd prefer to have semantic roles rather than presentational. Any additions to the roles supported in that file should probably be mentioned on the list first.

I'd image many users would be quite happy with a small set (9?)of 'color highlighting' sematic roles? Even just one (red?) could be useful.

Perhaps something like the six (five) [h1 headings]? Or color admonitions?

Or is injection of XML to set color for a text item possible?

But I have too little understanding of how things are processed to make sensible suggestions.

? isn't available as it's already used for conditional phrases. I wouldn't want to use up an punctuation for this. There are only so many characters available, I don't want to waste them.

Of course, sadly, squiggles are in critically short supply, so I only put ? as a marker for any one chosen.

follow-up: 4 comment:3 by Eric Niebler, 11 years ago

Owner:	changed from Eric Niebler to Daniel James

I don't own quickbook. Daniel, if you're not the owner, do you know who is?

in reply to: 3 comment:4 by Daniel James, 11 years ago

Status:	new → assigned

Replying to eric_niebler:

I don't own quickbook. Daniel, if you're not the owner, do you know who is?

It's Joel in trac, but it probably should be me. I don't know why this was assigned to you.

comment:5 by Daniel James, 11 years ago

(In [75255]) Quickbook: role tag for 1.6. Refs #5860.

This implements the markup [role red Some red text]. Although I'm not sure I like it that much. It would be pretty easy to use a template for the same effect.

This is just the quickbook part of supporting coloured text, to complete the ticket there needs to be css support for html pages and xsl support for pdfs.

comment:6 by Paul A. Bristow, 11 years ago

I've rebuilt using Quickbook in trunk (after 75255) changed the header to 1.6 and tried

[role red Some red text]

but it seems to be passed straight thru to the docbook and html as

<p>

[role red Some red text]

</p>

What am I missing? (apart from changes to .css to use this to redden)

comment:7 by anonymous, 11 years ago

It's on the quickbook-dev branch.

comment:8 by Paul A. Bristow, 11 years ago

OK - but I get a compile error in id_manager.cpp

Perhaps you are still working on this and I'm jumping the gun?

Not urgent, but red would be sexy ;-)

Wait until you put into trunk?

comment:9 by anonymous, 11 years ago

Maybe a bit longer. I'm going to try to get the 1.6 stuff finished within the next release cycle, and ask for feedback. If it's positive, then I'll make 1.6 final and it'll be fine to use. Alternatively I could move the more controversial features to a later version number, so that some of the simpler things are ready earlier.