BeatificaBytes

A new paragraph is usually started after a “Hard break” also known as a “Carriage Return”, which is indeed the default when typing “Enter” in a Word Processor. At the opposite, a simple “Line break” also known as “Soft Break” does not start a new paragraph and result in a normal line-spacing.

Ex.: The white-space between the previous text and this line is due to a “paragraph separator”. But here after, you will see two lines A. and B. separated by a simple line break.

A. first line of text
B. second line of text

Instead of typing “Enter” at the end of the line A., press “Shift-Enter” instead. That wilt result in a “soft break” (line break) instead of a “hard break” (carriage return).

Here is the list of supported syntaxes [syntax name: tag]:

ActionScript3: as3, actionscript3
Bash/shell: bash, shell
ColdFusion: cf, coldfusion
C#: c-sharp, csharp
C++: cpp, c
CSS: css
Delphi: delphi, pas, pascal
Diff: diff, patch
Erlang: erl, erlang
Groovy: groovy
JavaScript: js, jscript, javascript
Java: java
JavaFX: jfx, javafx
Perl: perl, pl
PHP: php
Plain Text: plain, text
PowerShell: ps, powershell
Python: py, python
Ruby: rails, ror, ruby
Scala: scala
SQL: sql
Visual Basic: vb, vbnet
XML: xml, xhtml, xslt, html, xhtml

The easiest it to use the tags here above as shortcode around your “code”, like this: [tag]my code[/tag] where tag can be php, vb, shell, ….

Here is a sample from Alex G.’s website using the tag “php” as a shortcode:

[php]// SyntaxHighlighter makes your code snippets
// beautiful without tiring your servers.
// http://alexgorbatchev.com
var setArray = function(elems) {
this.length = 0;
push.apply(this, elems);
return this;
}[/php]

There are various options than can be set using parameters: [tag parameter=”value”]my code[/tag]. Those options are listed in the “settings” page of the plugin (See via the WordPress admin dashboard).

The various issues I found are:

1. Although using the parameter gutter=”true”, I cannot remove the line numbering but keep the toolbar.
2. Copy/Paste code from an IDE does not provide a nice output:

• The indentation is lost,
• some lines of code become formatted as “paragraphs” and extra blank lines appears therefore

If you prefer to convert your code into HTML+CSS, the best online tool I found is Pygments (Python Syntax Highlighter) which supports for free much more languages than most others, has a simple interface and display not  advertisement.