PasH Pascal Highlighter

Read Me Document

Contents

• Introduction
• Why another Pascal highlighter?
• Using PasH
• CSS styles used by PasH
• Source code

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Introduction

PasH is a simple command line program highlights Pascal source code. It reads the original source code either from its standard input or from the clipboard and writes the highlighted code to standard output or the clipboard. XHTML is used for the Highlighted code and cascading style sheets are used to do the styling.

PasH can either generate complete XHTML documents or just fragments of XHTML code containing just the highlighted code. Complete documents contain an embedded CSS style sheet while code fragments require the user to define the required CSS classes.

The program is in beta. There are no frills. You can't change the highlighting styles in the current version. Use at your own risk.

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Why another Pascal highlighter?

Simple, I wanted an easy to use tool to format Pascal code for the DelphiDabbler website. I wanted the following:

1. Cascading style sheets.
2. Valid XHTML.
3. Full control over the appearance of the output code.
4. Ability highlight via the clipboard.
5. Option to generate XHTML fragments for inserting into existing documents.

On checking the available free tools I've found they're either two complex or don't provide one of the features I wanted. I'd already written highlighter code for my CodeSnip program, so I extracted that, tweaked it and wrapped it up in a command line program. Having made it I thought I'd release it in case anyone else finds it useful.

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Using PasH

To read Pascal source from a file and output HTML to another file do the following:

PasH <source.pas >hilite.html

This will read Pascal source from source.pas and write the highlighted code to hilite.html. The HTML output will be a complete XHTML document, with style sheet information embedded.

You can output to the clipboard instead of standard output by specifying the -wc switch and read from the clipboard instead of standard input by specifying the -rc switch. This is provided to make it easy to copy a code snippet to the clipboard from your Pascal editor, run PasH, then paste the formatted code straight into your HTML editor. Here's how to do that:

PasH -rc -wc

When using the clipboard what you often want is just an HTML fragement containing just the source code rather than the whole document. To do this you use the -frag flag. Here's how to paste an HTML fragment onto the clipboard. First copy some source code to the clipboard. Now do:

PasH -rc -wc -frag

And then paste the fragment into your HTML editor. The -frag switch also works with standard input and output. You can also combine the clipboard switches with standard input and output. So to format some source that is on the clipboard and write it to file you can use:

PasH -rc >output.html

Or, to read in some Pascal source from file and store the highlighted source code as an HTML fragment use:

Pash <source.pas -wc -frag

You can specify the -q switch with any of the above commands to prevent the program writing to the console.

Finally, the -h switch causes PasH to write some help text on the console. All other commands are ignored when -h is specified.

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CSS styles used by PasH

The HTML produced by PasH uses the following CSS classes:

• .pas-source – used to provide the name and size of font for the whole source code.
• .pas-comment – style for comments.
• .pas-kwd – style for keywords and reserved words.
• .pas-str – style for string literals.
• .pas-num – style for whole numbers (integers).
• .pas-float – style for floating point numbers.
• .pas-hex – style for hexadecimal numbers.
• .pas-preproc – style for preprocessor directives.
• .pas-asm – style for assembler.
• .pas-err – style for any errors detected.

.pas-source should define a font family and size while other classes should just define text colour, style, weight. See later in the document for details of the default styles.

When you produce complete HTML documents using PasH the definitions of the above styles are included in the document header. However, when you produce HTML fragments using the -frag switch no style definitions are included in the output – it is assumed that you will provide the definitions yourself.

To help with this, here are the default definitions for the classes that are used by PasH:

.pas-source {
    font-family: "Courier New", monospace; font-size: 9pt;
}
.pas-comment {
    font-style: italic; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none;
    color: #000080;
}
.pas-kwd {
    font-style: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;
}
.pas-str {
    font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none;
    color: #800080;
}
.pas-num, .pas-float, .pas-hex {
    font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none;
    color: #800000;
}
.pas-preproc {
    font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none;
    color: #008000;
}
.pas-asm {
    font-style: italic; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none;
}
.pas-err {
    font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none;
    color: #FF0000;
}

You can include these in a