highlighting.rst

Customizing Syntax Highlighting

Under the hood, nbconvert uses pygments to highlight code. pdf, webpdf and html exporting support changing the highlighting style.

Using Builtin styles

Pygments has a number of builtin styles available. To use them, we just need to set the style setting in the relevant preprocessor.

To change html and webpdf highlighting export with:

jupyter nbconvert --to html notebook.ipynb --CSSHTMLHeaderPreprocessor.style=<name>

To change pdf and latex highlighting export with:

jupyter nbconvert --to pdf notebook.ipynb --LatexPreprocessor.style=<name>

where <name> is the name of the pygments style. Available styles may vary from system to system. You can find all available styles with:

pygmentize -L styles

from a terminal or

from pygments.styles import get_all_styles

print(list(get_all_styles()))

from python.

You can preview all the styles from an environment that can display html like jupyter notebook with:

from pygments.styles import get_all_styles
from pygments.formatters import Terminal256Formatter
from pygments.lexers import PythonLexer
from pygments import highlight

code = """
import os
def function(test=1):
    if test in [3,4]:
      print(test)
"""
for style in get_all_styles():
    highlighted_code = highlight(code, PythonLexer(), Terminal256Formatter(style=style))
    print(f"{style}:\n{highlighted_code}")

Making your own styles

To make your own style you must subclass pygments.styles.Style, and then you must register your new style with Pygments using their plugin system. This is explained in detail in the Pygments documentation.