Title: The Wall

Dear Francis,

In the last issue of C Vu I said I hadn't yet found out how to customise the syntax highlighting colours in emacs; readers might like to know that it's on the menus under Options / Customise / Face and look for "font lock" faces. (It helps if you are used to emacs' way of doing things.)

I have an emacs lisp program that steps through emacs' data structures and turns the colour syntax highlighting into HTML. I use it for taking my code to my project supervisor so that we can view it on his web browser in my preferred colours. If anyone would find such a script useful, I would be happy to share it, although it is probably a bit too much lisp for C Vu.

Also, in the introduction to GUI programming, I mentioned that GTK does not let the user change fonts and colours. In fact it does, although it does not fit in with any standard like Xresources. The configuration of GTK is documented at http://developer.gnome.org/doc /API/gtk/gtk-resource-files.html. Of course, that doesn't stop some programmers from partially overriding the user's options, giving that recurring overlooked problem that I call the "colour bug" - an unreadable combination of the user's settings and the programmer's invariants, as in user's foreground + programmer's background or vice versa (try yellow on black for a week, on any operating system of your choice, and see how many applications present you with unreadable text). But that's no fault of GTK; any library can be abused. I think GTK may be worth more of a look.

Silas S Brown ( http://epona.ucam.org/~ssb22 )