kentcowgill.org/blog

So I'm working on a new presentation for my local Perl Mongers group, and (indirectly) thanks to Ricardo Signes, I've got a cool way to get properly syntax colored code into my slides.

Ricardo has been working on an easy way to get syntax colored code into Keynote presentations. I wondered why he was bothering to convert the syntax colored code to RTF - then I realized why - I think because TextEdit.app on Mac OSX is a cocoa application, the font coloring is preserved through copying and pasting the code into Keynote, another cocoa application.

A little later on, I was creating some other presentation, and was copying some code out of my blog and happened to notice that the code I copied and pasted from Safari, my web browser, also retained its coloring information.

Problem solved, right? Anything I want to put into a Keynote slide, I should blog about first. Right?

Wrong.

That's too much blogging.

Instead, I wrote a teeny tiny little CGI to post up the syntax colored source of anything sitting around on my server, using the same Text::VimColor module on the backend.

This is that CGI:

#!/usr/bin/perl -T

use strict;
use warnings;
use Text::VimColor;
use CGI qw/:standard/;
use CGI::Carp qw/fatalsToBrowser/;

$ENV{'PATH'} = '/bin';

my $file = param('f') || 'photos/photoblog';
my $lang = param('l') || 'perl';

die "Bad file" if $file =~ /^[^a-z]/i;
die "Bad file" if $file =~ /[^a-z\/._-]/i;
die "Bad file" unless -f $file;

die "Bad type" unless $lang =~ /(?:perl|php|xml)/;

open my $in, '<', $file;
my $text = do { local $/; <$in> };

my $vim = Text::VimColor->new(
  string      => $text,
  filetype    => $lang,
  vim_options
    => [qw(-RXZ -i NONE -u NONE -N -T xterm)],
  vim_command => '/usr/local/bin/vim',
)->html;

... and then a little HTML to display it in the right font, font size, and using my standard code stylesheet - which is left as an exercise for the reader.