Re: Feedback wanted: syntax highlighting in the LilyPond documentation

[Jean Abou Samra]

Le 04/01/2022 à 11:35, Thomas Morley a écrit :
> Am Di., 4. Jan. 2022 um 11:15 Uhr schrieb Paul McKay <plmcky@gmail.com>:
> > Hi
> > Speaking as someone whose eyesight isn't quite as good as it used to be,
> Same problem here
>
> > I'd like to suggest that anything in a colour is also in bold so that there are 
> > enough pixels for me to see what the colour is.
> I'd go even further, why not all bold, apart from comments?
> At least that's the way I configured my own editor.


I think it would be too much. Bold conveys the
message of something important. To me, an example
that is all bold sounds a bit like shouting;
not sure if you see what I mean? Plus, testing
it with new_style.py (just set Token: "bold"
if you want to play with it), I get the feeling
of a discordance between the style of the text and
that of the code. Screenshot:





I think we should rather try to make it readable
without bold, possibly increasing the font size
a bit (it's quite small at the moment) and possibly
picking a different font.


> I don't have strong feelings about colors, though. My own
> configuration is indeed like "angry fruit salad", but I doubt there
> will be any setting satisfying everyone.


This is possibly the wisest remark in this thread.


[Robin]
> The stroke width I see is 1px (Firefox at 100%).  This makes the 
> stroke dominated by edge effects; the surrounding white dilutes its 
> colour.
> Do the WCAG recommendations recognise this?  If not, please don't 
> apply their levels to this case.


I don't know. I am not a great specialist of all
the (complicated) WCAG rules. All I have been
interested in so far was the ones for color;
their criteria were a handy way to know if
the scheme was OK given that I could not experience
the highlighting from the point of view of a
colorblind person myself. The end goal is definitely
to have the documentation site readable for
everyone -- including those with disabilities --
and not just to follow recommendations blindly.


[Paul]
> And this seems the appropriate place to ask why the examples are all 
> in fixed pitch Courier in any case. I know this is kind of  industry 
> standard but it's one I don't find particularly helpful. I was once 
> adept on the card punch machines and mechanical typewriters, but I 
> think most of us abandoned fixed pitch fonts long, long ago. I'd 
> suggest a sans serif font so that there's a clear contrast with the 
> Georgia used as the text font in the documentation. Helvetica, 
> Franklin Gothic and Source Sans Pro look good but I realize they might 
> not be available on some platforms.


Independently of the fact that I'm not
fond of the idea, a number of documentation
examples rely on the alignment specific to
fixed-width fonts. This comes to mind for
example:

http://abou-samra.fr/highlighting-demo/notation/multiple-voices.html#writing-music-in-parallel

So there is more to such a shift than introducing
highlighting.

Regards,
Jean