Sunday, October 04, 2009

QSource-Highlight - a Qt interface for GNU Source-Highlight

I recently released a new software developed with Qt 4 (this summer I took a chance to use qt and really enjoyed this wonderful framework): QSource-Highlight - a Qt interface for GNU Source-Highlight.

You can highlight your code on the fly, and have the highlighted output in all the formats supported by source-highlight (e.g., HTML, LaTeX, Texinfo, etc.). You can then copy the formatted output and paste it (e.g., in your blog), or save it to a file.

A preview of the highlighted output is available for some output formats (e.g., HTML, XHTML, etc.).


Here are some screenshots:

The preview of highlighting of some selected lines, with line numbers and 4 context lines.

The preview with line numbers (using '-' as padding char).

Latex (with color) output (source, no preview), with "entire doc" option.

The language definition file is automatically selected according to the input file extension, but you can change it manually by using the corresponding combo box. In particular you have three combo boxes:

  • the combo box for the input language definition (e.g., C, C++, Java, etc.); in particular, the combo box refers to the .lang files of Source-Highlight, which, however, should have quite intuitive names.
  • the combo box for the output format (e.g., HTML, LaTeX, etc.); in particular, the combo box refers to the .outlang files of Source-Highlight, which, however, should have quite intuitive names (e.g., htmltable.outlang generates HTML output into an html table).
  • the combo box for the highlighting style (e.g., colors, and formats of the elements of the language); these elements refer to Source-Highlight .style files and to .css files.

All the files named in these combo boxes refer to files shipped with Source-highlight, and they are searched for in the Source-highlight corresponding installation path. In case the combo boxes are empty, then the path where source-highlight searches for these files is wrong: you should then configure the correct path for source-highlight using the settings dialog (Source-Highlight Settings).


The complete documentation is available here.


QSource-Highlight uses the library included in GNU Source-Highlight, since version 3, thus you need that library to build QSource-Highlight; in particular it uses Source-Highlight-Qt (which I've already blogged about) additional library, http://srchiliteqt.sourceforge.net, which provides highlighting in Qt relying on GNU Source-Highlight. Thus, you need to install Source-Highlight-Qt as well. we refer to GNU Source-Highlight's and Source-Highlight-Qt's websites for further information about the library and its installation (you may want to check whether your distribution already provides packages for these two libraries).

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