Lastly I tried the Solarized color theme for Emacs which provides a nifty color scheme (for light or dark backgrounds). This led me to wonder whether I could use this theme for highlighting code chunks in my $\LaTeX$ documents.

Although it looks great, I gave up on it for Emacs because I had difficulties reading my text with the base color for body text (base0 or base00, depending on the background color). Also, I don’t like having different emphasizes for the same code identifier, e.g. <a href= where color for < is different than for a.

Pygmentize

Pygmentize is very great, and the Minted $\LaTeX$ package is based on it. I already dropped some words on it. According to the documentation, it is possible to customize the output and add our own formatter. Let’s try a simplified style:

from pygments.style import Style
from pygments.token import Keyword, Name, Comment, String, Error, \
     Number, Operator, Token

class SolarizedStyle(Style):
    background_color = "#fcf4dc"
    default_style = ""
    styles = {
        Token:                  '#52676f',
        Comment:                '#465a61',

        Operator:               '#728a05',       
        Keyword:                '#728a05',

        Name:                   "#a57705",
        Name.Builtin:           '#2075c7',
        Name.Function:          '#2075c7',
        Name.Class:             '#2075c7',

        String:                 '#259185',
        Number:                 '#c61b6e'
    }

Then, we need to put this in the pygments/styles/ folder, in Python site-packages. To check that it works,

>>> from pygments.styles import get_style_by_name
>>> get_style_by_name('solarized')

It should return something like

pygments.styles.solarized.SolarizedStyle

We can test it with a little Python script, e.g. par_checker.py. Below, from left to right are the simplified solarized theme, and the built-in colorful and Tango themes.

I must admit that I still like how the Tango palette looks like. Now, here is how it looks under my Emacs (left, solarized; right, my custom tango palette):

Well, I have to test it into a $\LaTeX$ paper.

VIM color scheme

The Tango palette is great. And it is with great irony that I have to use VIM to beautify my code that I’m typing in Emacs. Indeed, as I like working with Context, instead of $\LaTeX$, I was in need of an efficient solution for syntax highlighting. Despite my best efforts with on-line wiki, I raised the question on http://tex.stackexchange.com, see Code highlighting in ConTeXt. At the time I asked on tex.SE, I wasn’t able to get it because of my outdated version of Context. Once I updated to the svn version, everything worked well per @Aditya’s solution.

Let’s wrap the above code like this:

\usemodule[vim]

\starttext
\definevimtyping [PYTHON] [syntax=python]
\startPYTHON
 ### Put code here ###
\stopPYTHON
\stoptext

Then, run it:

$ context par_checker.tex

I got the following PDF: