[texworks] HELP with Tw 0.4.3 syntax highlighting

[Paul A Norman]

Hi Carlo,

"Try activating the following menu item: `Window->Show->Tags`. This
will add a sidebar that will allow you to jump around to the
sections/subsections/etc of your document. Hopefully it provides some
of the functionality you are looking for."

In your editing document you can put:--

%: Evidence One starts here
EVIDENCE One

and "Evidence One starts here" will show in the tag window that
Charlie has pointed you to.

Its the %: at the beginning of the line that makes that manual kind of
entry show in your tag window, but not in your output (pdf).

% tells TeX to ignore the rest of the information on that line, so you
can write comments to your self. %: makes the remarks appear in your
tag window.

Clicking on entries in the Tag Window jumps you to the area of the editor.

You can get other things to automatically show in your Tag windows by
using regular expressions in
    tag-patterns.txt     (back up the file first)
have a look in it to see how the tag-patterns are done.

It can be got to from your
Scripts menu, choose "Scripting Tex Works" / Show Scripts Folder, go
up one directory,
then into the directory called configuration.

Also highlighting and colour changes and styling: bold, italic, and
underlining,  can be achieved by editing
    syntax-patterns.txt
in the same folder as described above.

You will notice  sections there,  e.g. [Latex]

You can either put things in [Latex] section or make a new section at
the end of another section, perhaps [Thesis]  and write your
syntax-patterns in there - then choose which scheme you want to use in
your editing document under the menu on Format/ Syntax Colouring.

I'd recommend considering using the existing [Latex] section for what
you are doing. But remember to backup these files before changing any
of  them, so that you can revert back to them if necessary (if things
go badly wrong in your editing of them :)

Put any often repeated things, or regular expressions for patterns of
text that you want highlighted/coloured/styled the same way.

For example you could add a line

Black/Yellow;B n ^[^\s]*:

Which would at least highlight anything that starts as one word and
ends with a colon: (i.e. with no spaces in it).

Black - foreground colour
/Yellow - background-colour
;B - bold
n - No spell checking inside described area (y for spell checking)
^ start of string (in Tw editor context - here a line)
[^\s] here the ^ inside [] means essentially anything but \s which
means a space or a tab etc
* any number of the immediately preceding - here meaning any number of
non space items
: a literal colon

Try just the following it might be enough

Black/Green;B n EVIDENCE

or

Black/Green;B y  ^.*EVIDENCE.*$

For a whole line, with EVIDENCE in it, at a time. with spell checking.

Afaik, none of the changes that you might make to either
tag-patterns.txt or syntax-patterns.txt will take effect until you
completely restart TeXworks, which is a bit difficult for testing!

Regular expressions are a bit to get your head around unless your
brain is naturally wired for that kind of thing, but you can get there
with trial and patience, and then its  just like when learning a
foreign language, it all suddenly starts to  click into place.

Regular expressions are also used for searches as an optional and
sometimes optimal way of finding things in many computer applications
(and in TeXworks), so they are worth learning to some extent,
depending upon your needs

Alain Delmotte and Stefan Löffler,  and others have made a real effort
to give people a kick start in the TeXworks manual, which you can open
form your Help menu. In there you will find introductions and more
information on many of these things (and more!), and pointers to
TeXworks wiki entries for more information.

For regular expressions, even help information based around web pages
will be of help, or use testing modules provided  on the web to try
out your regular expressions first.

Paul

On 14 July 2011 10:27, Herbert Schulz <herbs at wideopenwest.com> wrote:
>
> On Jul 13, 2011, at 4:40 PM, Carlo Marmo wrote:
>
>> Thank you.
>> Last question, I promise. Where can I find some examples of syntax
>> highlighting, in order to figure out what kind of problems it is design to
>> solve?
>> Carlo
>
> Howdy,
>
> Open any latex file and see what it does.
>
> Good Luck,
>
> Herb Schulz
> (herbs at wideopenwest dot com)
>
>
>
>