Ever wonder how people do things but you feel too silly to ask? I do sometimes. Take code highlighting on the web for example. I see people posting fully highlighted code snippets in their blogs and I have no idea how they managed it. Surely they weren't doing it all manually.

I still don't know how most people do it but I have found one way to do it. After what seems like an age, my favourite text editor, TextPad, has had an upgrade. One of the new features is the ability to:

Publish your code on the web, with full syntax highlighting, using the new "Copy as a HTML page" command.

Here's an example (and a piece of code worth keeping hold of):

//Remove leading and trailing spaces from a string
//Originally written by Jim Fricker
function trim(aStr) {
return aStr.replace(/^\s{1,}/, "").replace(/\s{1,}$/, "")
}

Nice. You can even create your own highlighting definitions. Thanks to Page Nix there's already one for LotusScript and @Formulas that we can download from the site along with many others. Not sure how useful it is to be able to have coloured HTML of your Notes function but it appeals to me as the owner of a code store ;o)

REM "Function to create a calendar of a month's blogs";
tmp := @DbLookup(""; ""; "calendar"; ShowBlogsFor; 2);
blogs:=@If(@IsError(tmp); ""; tmp);
startDate:=@Date( @TextToNumber(@Left(ShowBlogsFor;"-")); 
@TextToNumber(@Right(ShowBlogsFor; "-")); 1);
startDay := @Weekday( startDate );

Another nice new feature is the ability to paste text you've copied from IE or Mozilla in to an open .html document with all the markup intact. A bit like Domino Designer does with Pages but not as annoying ;o)