Visual Studio: Preserving syntax coloring when pasting code into HTML

Question

I'm writing some documentation that will occasionally include C# or C++ code snippets.

In Visual Studio, the Edit/Copy command includes syntax coloring. You can see this if you paste the text into, e.g., Word or Outlook. In fact, if you use the "Paste Special..." command, you can see that it's "Rich Text (RTF)".

However, when pasting this text into an HTML file in Visual Studio, none of the colouring (or even formatting) is preserved.

Any ideas? I'm looking specifically for something that works locally (preferably in Visual Studio), not JavaScript-based solutions (such as SyntaxHighlighter).

Answer 1

You can use existing C to HTML syntax highlighter tools for converting your snippets into HTML and copy&pasting from there. Here's a list of such tools (not exhaustive and in no particular order):

• GNU Enscript
• GNU Emacs with htmlize.el module allows you to dump a highlighted Emacs buffer as HTML

There might also exist web services that allow you to copy&paste C code into a form and get highlighted HTML back.

Answer 2

There's an addin called CopySourceAsHtml which does a pretty neat job. I've used it a few times, but I use a Javascript to do the highlighting on my blog these days (so it's "plaintext readable").

Answer 3

I use this for highlighting code on webpages. It's simple to use and easy to extend.

http://code.google.com/p/syntaxhighlighter/

It also supports C#.