Ask HN: review my tiny app - code to html converter | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: review my tiny app - code to html converter

hilite.me

55 pointsalexkay59 comments

Nice work.

Quick suggestion though (for ease of copy-pasting by end-users):

From the resulting rendered html with line numbers, the line numbers are also copied into the clipboard, which is undesirable. Suggest you put them in separate elements like dpaste does it, for easy selection without line numbers: http://dpaste.com/hold/93427/

Thanks!

Great suggestion, I will see what I can do.

Useful app. But just an fyi, vim has a ':TOHtml' feature that generates an html files from your code (including color scheme).

I'm afraid I'm an Emacs guy :-p

Luckily, emacs has a set of htmlize-* functions as well.

Just a quick note, the exact command is ':TOhtml' (lowercase h). Tripped me up the first time I tried to run the command.

Nice! Just need a default "colour on black" version without fiddling with the CSS.

I wish this had been around when I was doing my last blog post; would have saved a lot of messing around with TextMate's HTML generation.

Bookmarked!

I'm using this CSS for my own "colour on black" blog:

  color:white;background:black;border:solid gray;border-width:.1em .1em .1em .8em;padding:.2em .6em;

You basically just swap the color and the background styles. Also, for best results select the "fruity" color style.

By the way, the CSS and the style are remembered in the cookies, no need to re-type them on each visit.

With the fruity style, keywords seem to render white (on a white background) so they go invisible.

Is this intentional for black backgrounds as you mentioned? If so, changing to fruity should change the default CSS.

Yes, the "fruity" style (and to some extent "native") is for dark backgrounds.

Changing the default CSS if they are selected is a good idea, thanks!

Looks good! I would suggest to auto-highlight everything in the HTML box when you click inside it. That would save the user an extra click.

See my other comment on javascript. That's something I still want to play with.

I was thinking of making something similar, but just with an API that you could POST to. Perhaps you could consider adding an API?

Good idea, I will probably do it.

I did it anyway :) http://pygments.appspot.com/

Me too :) http://www.hilite.me/api

Awesome!

"... Ask HN: review my tiny app ..."

works well for me. I'd like to see JSON as a data format or better still an API to let you define your own code to convert.

Thanks! I will work on the API.

Cool little app. One little improvement I thought of though, is to move the inline styles into the header, even if you're just using class names like "code1", "code2", etc.

It would just make it a bit easier to read the source code or change the code colors if you ever needed to. It should also give you a small decrease in the actual code size, which could matter if you were posting a lot of code on a heavily-visited site.

The reason I wrote this tool is because some blog hosting providers don't allow to inject custom CSS or javascript into the <header>

There are already quite a few solutions for those who can modify the header, the most famous is http://alexgorbatchev.com/wiki/SyntaxHighlighter

I think you can register CSS classes via JavaScript...so if they couldn't put a style block in the header, they could put a script block in the body.

I use gist.github.com for this. Advantages:

* Always editable in a clean text-area. * Version controlled. * Language detection and syntax highlighting.

GitHub's gists can indeed be embedded to blog posts, but only using an external js script. This won't work with blog hosting providers that don't allow JavaScript (for example wordpress.com).

Also, this method won't work too well when the post is viewed in an rss reader.

Agreed.

I have waffled back & forth on embedding gists in my blog posts because they don't show up in RSS readers. Also, if you have a long blog post with multiple snippets of code you have to create a new gist for each one. It'd be nice if each 'file' in a gist could be embedded separately.

Pretty good idea. I have something specially rigged for Ruby use (I basically use this for Ruby Inside): http://www.rubyinside.com/advent2006/7-coloring.html

In future, though, I'll probably move to a JavaScript solution as this hard coding just doesn't feel right anymore.

Thanks Peter. As I mentioned earlier, javascript solutions work great but have two major limitations: not all hosting providers allow embeddable js; and javascripted highlighting doesn't work too well in rss readers.

It might be useful to add a button that copies the resultant code to your clipboard. I don't know how cross browser that is but it could be nice. I don't think that it should be the default action when you generate though because people will not know that it is happening and they might not want the clipboard data to get overwritten.

AFAIK, copying to the clipboard requires embedding an swf file. I might do this, thanks for the suggestion!

Though this is a pretty nice and useful piece of code, I will stick to using SyntaxHighlighter for my blog, because it offers me the ability to include a plaintext view function and a print function. The plaintext view removes the linenumbers and all other info apart from the actual code.

SyntaxHighlighter is great, no doubt here. It has its pros which you listed, and a couple of cons:

* It requires to link to a js script which is not always possible.

* It doesn't work in many rss readers.

Hmmmm... I never knew it din't work in RSS readers. But I guess that's not too much of a dealbreaker right now. Perhaps if my feed subscribers increase, I'll switch.

I refer to this process as Pretty Printing ...

if you can, could you please use this term in keywords somewhere for older coders like me. Then we can find it via searching on those terms

Excellent app.

Thanks, I definitely will! Any other keyword suggestions by the way?

I guess you should look at an established provider of one-function tools like

http://www.network-science.de/ascii/

if you find yourself popular and wanting to monetize