Re: RFC: Adding syntax highlighting to the official documentation

[Aaron Hill]

On 2021-12-18 8:18 pm, John Wheeler wrote:
> The other concern is more a personal thing with me.  When I say
> printed text, I was referring to pdf output. I will often print a pdf
> file so I can better read it from paper.  When you mentioned adding
> color to pdf files, you caught my attention.  I have seen too many
> books that I personally have a very hard time using because either
> someone has indiscriminately highlighted passages they thought
> important or the book designer decided to use color in some way to
> "guide" the reader. What other people must see as artful use of color
> I find so distracting that I struggle to follow the text. [ . . . ]

To add to this, color schemes in general are very personal.

Thankfully, HTML documentation can leverage the power of CSS, so anyone 
who feels strongly enough can inject a custom stylesheet to get 
something that reads well.  However, formats like PDF where the 
highlighting would be baked-in would not be able to adapt to individual 
preference.  I would argue such targets should stick to black and white, 
only using color where relevant to a snippet.

As an alternative to color, perhaps the syntax highlighting could focus 
only on varying font weight, style, etc.  This would be more in keeping 
with, say, Knuth's approach he presented as part of literate 
programming.  One of the things he found was that proportional fonts 
often read better than monospace in print.  We would not have to follow 
suit so precisely, but I'm sure there are lessons learned back then that 
could help today.


-- Aaron Hill