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Code Highlighting with Pygments​

Pygments is a Python library for highlight code snippets in various languages. There is a plugin for LF code highlighting available. This provides a tool for automatically generating beutiful LF code listings in a range of styles and in various output formats such as PNG, SVG, and HTML. It also integrates with LaTeX.

Installation​

We recommend to use a virtual environment to install the plugin and all its dependencies. There are several tool for managing virtual environments available. For instance:

virtualenv ~/virtualenvs/lf-lexer -p python3
source ~/virtualenvs/lf-lexer/bin/activate

You can also skip this step if you prefer installing the package in your user environment.

To install the plugin, the following commands:

git clone https://github.com/lf-lang/lf-pygments-lexer.git
cd lf-pygments-lexer
pip install.

Usage​

Command Line​

Pygements provides a CLI tool called pygmentize. For example, you can use it to produce an image containing highlighted LF code like so:

pygmentize path/to/Example.lf -o out.png

Note that pygments automatically selects the right language. For this it processes both the file extension and the target declaration in it. Therefore, auto detection works as long as your file uses the .lf suffix and contains a valid target declaration. If auto detection does not work as expected, you can to specify the language using the -l flag. For instance to use the Python target of LF, use -l lf-py.

See the pygments documentation for more detailed usage instructions.

LaTeX​

Most prominently, pygments is used by the minted LaTeX package to create beautiful code listings with proper code highlighting. Using this is as simple as adding \usepackage{minted} and then adding minted blocks containing the code to be highlighted. There is an example document available here.