Forum Discussion
Color Syntax Highlighter for Code Snippet
I agree that the Code Snippet block could definitely be updated with some improvements! While embedding from external sites like GitHub is an option, managing all of those individual links to external code for a coding-heavy course can still be a lot. I'd love to cut down on that link management by being able to have syntax-highlighted code straight in Rise.
Additionally, right now you can change the background color of the snippet, but you can't change the text color in the snippet. So if I were to change the background color to black, the text would be unreadable because you can't change it to white or other colors.
It would be great if we could get a drop-down menu where you can choose the coding language you're adding and it could auto-color the code based on the language you select. For an example of how this works, you can reference websites like CodePen or Replit where the code matches how it would look in a code editor.
Unfortunately, my team has been unable to use the code snippet blocks to show code because of its lack of customization. We currently manually color text in paragraphs and numbered step blocks, which is fairly time-consuming. So if we could use code snippet blocks to present information and auto-highlight colors, that would save us a lot of time and make our courses look even better!
Hi Michelle, It's been a long time since your comments were posted, but I am having the same problem you noted 3 years ago. Have you found any solutions to the "We currently manually color text in paragraphs and numbered step blocks," or other resources? If you are still doing this work on Articulate, does Storyline offer any options?
Carrie
Hi Carrie, unfortunately we still manually color the text for the most part. I've since made some template blocks that have a black background and white text (for paragraphs/steps), but that's been the farthest I've gotten on this. Unfortunately, there haven't been any Rise features released to help with this since then, to my knowledge, either.
I haven't worked much with Storyline, but that could be somewhere to explore. I also looked at the new Custom Block feature in Rise, but unfortunately it didn't have anything to streamline code for how we use it in courses.
For longer code, we sometimes manage external GitHub links, but for snippets and single lines, we just have to do the additional work to manually color them otherwise.I'd love to see some movement on this feature request in the future, though. It's been one of the most difficult parts of writing courses that deal with code for sure.
Custom/html block might be a good solution for this, I'll plan on putting together a sample. Will probably use highlight.js as a starting point. Question- are you using colors to recolor certain parts of the code each time, or are you highlighting specific parts of the code to emphasize for your learners?
