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c-cube / printbox

print nested boxes, lists, arrays, tables in several formats
https://c-cube.github.io/printbox/
BSD 2-Clause "Simplified" License
75 stars 9 forks source link

Allow the use of styles or colors #1

Closed grayswandyr closed 4 years ago

grayswandyr commented 6 years ago

Thanks for this useful package. It would be great to be able to apply styles (bold, italic) or colors on specific boxes; or to have boxes preserve the style of strings inside them (set with libraries such as CCFormat or Fmt).

c-cube commented 6 years ago

I think that you could have colors right now (by using CCFormat.sprintf with colored tags) but it would break the layout because the string would take less space than expected (the chars part of the ANSI code would count in the expected size, but not in actual screen space). It's probably more realistic to have styling directly in printbox (colored boxes), even if it's less flexible. I have no better solution right now.

grayswandyr commented 6 years ago

You mean colored backgrounds for boxes? If so, that would indeed already be nice. I print chronograms as tables and my aim is to outline cells that contain data whose value differs from the previous one.

c-cube commented 6 years ago

Yeah, something like that (or colored text); both should be actually possible, the point is that printbox must be aware of the formatting.

c-cube commented 6 years ago

Other argument: there is also a html backend (where colors should be handled natively with inline style).

Would you be interested in contributing this? The simplest way would be to add a Set_fg_color of t * color | Set_bg_color of t * color to Printbox.t, and handle these properly in both backends.

Gbury commented 6 years ago

Though the set_color option seems the simplest to implement, I'd like to also have optional arguments for the box constructors.

In order to avoid having too many arguments (colors, bg_color, bold/italic, etc...), I think we could take inspiration from what is done in notty (cf http://pqwy.github.io/notty/doc/Notty.A.html#TYPEstyle ), which defines a 'style' type, with combinators.

grayswandyr commented 6 years ago

@c-cube In principle I would answer positively but I don't think I have the necessary combination of available time and understanding of the library as well as of terminal manipulation. Hence I'll pass here, sorry.