Syntax Highlighting in Your Posts

Ever wish your blog articles had the nice syntax highlighting of your favorite Ruby editor? Now they can with Syntax.

Syntax can be installed as a RubyGem. On Mac OS X, I do it like this:

$ sudo gem install -r syntax

Syntax is easy to use. Here’s a script that runs Syntax on the file named as its first parameter and writes some nice html to stdout. Of course, you can redirect this to a file. (I ran this script on itself to to add syntax highlighting here).

require 'rubygems'
require_gem 'syntax'
require 'syntax/convertors/html'
# a comment
convertor = Syntax::Convertors::HTML.for_syntax "ruby"
puts( convertor.convert( File.read( ARGV[0] ) ) )

The output of this script is some nice HTML of your Ruby code ready to be customized with a CSS stylesheet of your choosing. For this article, I’ve embedded a stylesheet:

.keyword { font-family: monospace; color: #8B0000; }
.constant, .attribute, .global, .class, .module { 
  font-family: monospace; color: black;
}
.string { font-family: monospace; color: #00008B; }
.ident, .method { font-family: monospace; color: #006400; }
.number, .char { font-family: monospace; color: #888800; }
.comment { font-family: monospace; color: purple; }
.symbol { font-family: monospace; color: #884400; }
.regex { font-family: monospace; color: #808080; }
.punct { font-family: monospace; color: black; }
.escape, .interp, .expr {
  font-family: monospace; color: black; background-color: #dddddd; 
}

Simple to install and simple to use, color the Ruby code in your articles with Syntax.