Re: Colorizing source code in Info manuals

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2024 23:06:37 +0100
> From: Cecilio Pardo <cpardo@imayhem.com>
> 
> As texinfo is not going to add features like color to the Info format,
> I think maybe emacs could add some itself.

I'm not sure "is not going to add features like color to the Info
format" is correct.  Texinfo does support syntax-highlighting of code
snippets in HTML output (for now as an experimental feature), so it is
not outlandish to assume something similar can be done for the Info
format as well.

> For example, the Emacs Lisp Intro uses @smallexample blocks for
> presenting lisp code. I modified makeinfo more or less successfully to
> generate a file with the line numbers where these blocks start. With
> this kind of information, emacs could fontify the source code.
> 
> Does this sound good?

I think this should be discussed with the Texinfo developers, not
here.  I can think about at least two possible ways of implementing
this in Texinfo:

 . makeinfo could mark the code blocks with special markers, similar
   to what it already does with image specs and indices
 . makeinfo could produce ANSI color escape sequences in the Info
   output, driven by the same syntax-highlighting machinery already
   used for HTML