winprint VS termfo

I built a cross platform app to print 'pretty formatted' source code [1]. I didn't want to re-invent the wheel on formatting source code, so looked at all the existing libraries. Originally I figured formatting to HTML, and then building a print-friendly HTML render would work. But this proved super challenging. I tried a dozen HTML engines (including Chromium) but none gave me enough control to render just a single page of the original source file.

Then I noticed Pygments, a Python-based library for pretty formatting source code, has an option to output an ANSI formatted file. I quickly found a bunch of libraries that could render ANSI formatted text to a print canvas.

In the end, I put the original source code file through 'pygmentize -16m -o tempfile.an` (`16m` is the 16M color terminal ANSI formatter) and pipe the `tempfile.an` through a print-optimized renderer to actually print the source code.

ANSI escapes FTW!

[1] WinPrint - https://github.com/tig/winprint

> From the tone of this piece I gather that the ANSI escape codes are actually standard enough to target.

termfo[1] comes with a "termfo" CLI utility which groups terminals by escape code; for example "termfo find-cap save_cursor" shows that almost all terminals use "\x1b7", with just a few very old ones using something different (full output is a bit long, but it's at [2]).

It's useful to check "can I safely hard-code this escape code?" But like you said: for ANSI it's pretty safe to just hard-code most codes, especially the common ones, but never hurts to check.

[1]: https://github.com/arp242/termfo

[2]: https://pastebin.com/raw/pVHGR6aZ