How does AutoStyleWords work?

Question

The title says it all. I assume it provides some way of automatically applying a certain style, or a list of options, to certain words written, just like other options of the sort like AutoItalicWords. But I haven't been able to make it work...

Thanks!

Answer 1

A very similar question came up internally at WRI, so I have a nearly ready-made answer. In that case, the fellow wanted to highlight certain loop constructs, like Do and For in his code automatically. Here's how I responded.

In a fresh notebook, Format->Edit Stylesheet..., then paste and interpret the cells below at the bottom of the stylesheet. And voila, you'll got purple Dos and Fors in the notebook the stylesheet modified.

{
Cell[StyleData["Input"],
 AutoStyleWords->{"Do"->"MyStyle", "For"->"MyStyle"}],

Cell[StyleData["MyStyle"],
 FontColor->RGBColor[0.5, 0, 0.5]]
}

Some caveats about using this:

• The thing on the rhs of the rule must be a named style (a slightly archaic and embarrassing limitation in a modern FE, but that's the way it is in v8).
• There's a bug (fixed for future versions) in the validation of this option which can cause a crash if you feed it values formatted in any way other than this.
• This will only work in typeset cells
• This will only work to style things which are lexically word-type tokens. You cannot, for example, auto-style two words in sequence, a subexpression with an operator, or a substring of a word token.