Syntax highlighting in presentations

I often go back and forward between presentations software, trying to find the best one, never being happy. I recently used cleaver , which is nice for simple stuff, but this time I’m back to LibreOffice Impress because I don’t want to spend a long time fighting with layout.

One task that’s never super obvious is figuring out how to do syntax highlighting of code in my presentations. I wanted to share my solution. I’m fairly sure this will also work for MS Office and maybe even Keynote.

First, download Pygments . Pygments is a syntax highlighting tool for the command line.

On ubuntu it can be installed with:

apt-get install python-pygments

If you’re on a Mac, I don’t believe there’s a homebrew package. This should work though:

sudo easy_install Pygments

After that, we’re using the tool to convert your source file into a syntax highlighted RTF file ! Yes, the old school format you’d never thought you’d need again.

Run it like this:

pygmentize -O style=xcode -o output.rtf input.js

I picked the xcode style, because it worked fairly well with the light backgrounds in my presentation, but other styles are supported. To see a list run:

pygmentize -L

Instead of pygmentize I also tried highlight , but it was impossible for me to build and seems a bit over engineered.

Using the file

In LibreOffice Impress, just click “Insert” and then “File” to find your rtf file.

Batch syntax highlighting

I don’t want to have to type this every time, so I made this Makefile to automatically do this. The file assumes that you have:

A src/ directory containing .js files (you can change the extension). An empty rtf/ directory.

STYLE=xcode SRC = $(wildcard src/*.js) RTF = $(patsubst src/%.js, rtf/%.js.rtf, $(SRC)) all: $(RTF) rtf/%.js.rtf: src/%.js pygmentize -O style=$(STYLE) -o $@ $< clean: rm rtf/*.rtf