Text Attribute Markup

Text Attribute Markup — Simple markup language to encode text with attributes

Pango Text Attribute Markup Language

Frequently, you want to display some text to the user with attributes applied to part of the text (for example, you might want bold or italicized words). With the base Pango interfaces, you could create a PangoAttrList and apply it to the text; the problem is that you'd need to apply attributes to some numeric range of characters, for example "characters 12-17." This is broken from an internationalization standpoint; once the text is translated, the word you wanted to italicize could be in a different position.

The solution is to include the text attributes in the string to be translated. Pango provides this feature with a small markup language. You can parse a marked-up string into the string text plus a PangoAttrList using the function pango_parse_markup().

A simple example of a marked-up string might be: "Blue text is cool!"

The root tag of a marked-up document is <markup>, but pango_parse_markup() allows you to omit this tag, so you will most likely never need to use it. The most general markup tag is , then there are some convenience tags. has the following attributes:

 attributes

font^[1], font_desc	A font description string, such as "Sans Italic 12". See pango_font_description_from_string() for a description of the format of the string representation . Note that any other span attributes will override this description. So if you have "Sans Italic" and also a style="normal" attribute, you will get Sans normal, not italic.
font_family, face	A font family name
font_size^[1], size	Font size in 1024ths of a point, or one of the absolute sizes 'xx-small', 'x-small', 'small', 'medium', 'large', 'x-large', 'xx-large', or one of the relative sizes 'smaller' or 'larger'. If you want to specify a absolute size, it's usually easier to take advantage of the ability to specify a partial font description using 'font'; you can use `font='12.5'` rather than `size='12800'`.
font_style^[1], style	One of 'normal', 'oblique', 'italic'
font_weight^[1], weight	One of 'ultralight', 'light', 'normal', 'bold', 'ultrabold', 'heavy', or a numeric weight
font_variant^[1], variant	One of 'normal' or 'smallcaps'
font_stretch^[1], stretch	One of 'ultracondensed', 'extracondensed', 'condensed', 'semicondensed', 'normal', 'semiexpanded', 'expanded', 'extraexpanded', 'ultraexpanded'
foreground, fgcolor^[1], color	An RGB color specification such as '#00FF00' or a color name such as 'red'
background, bgcolor^[1]	An RGB color specification such as '#00FF00' or a color name such as 'red'
underline	One of 'none', 'single', 'double', 'low', 'error'
underline_color	The color of underlines; an RGB color specification such as '#00FF00' or a color name such as 'red'
rise	Vertical displacement, in 10000ths of an em. Can be negative for subscript, positive for superscript.
strikethrough	'true' or 'false' whether to strike through the text
strikethrough_color	The color of strikethrough lines; an RGB color specification such as '#00FF00' or a color name such as 'red'
fallback	'true' or 'false' whether to enable fallback. If disabled, then characters will only be used from the closest matching font on the system. No fallback will be done to other fonts on the system that might contain the characters in the text. Fallback is enabled by default. Most applications should not disable fallback.
lang	A language code, indicating the text language
letter_spacing	Inter-letter spacing in 1024ths of a point.
gravity	One of 'south', 'east', 'north', 'west', 'auto'.
gravity_hint	One of 'natural', 'strong', 'line'.

The following convenience tags are provided:

Convenience tags

b	Bold
big	Makes font relatively larger, equivalent to <span size="larger">
i	Italic
s	Strikethrough
sub	Subscript
sup	Superscript
small	Makes font relatively smaller, equivalent to <span size="smaller">
tt	Monospace font
u	Underline

^[1]Since 1.21