Shanto Roy

I Explore Research, Tech, Travel, and Business. PhD Student @UHCS.

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Sometimes we need to include codes in our Latex documents. In this post we will see how to add codes with color formatting and line numbers.

Requirements

We need to packages to work with code environments. listing is used to create styles and environments for adding codes in the document. color or xcolor is used to define custom colors only if you feel to use a custom one.

\usepackage{listings}
\usepackage{xcolor}

Define Color

If you need to use custom defined colors, you can use \definecolor command followed by the custom color name and the rgb settings.

\definecolor{customgreen}{rgb}{0,0.6,0}
\definecolor{customgray}{rgb}{0.5,0.5,0.5}
\definecolor{custommauve}{rgb}{0.6,0,0.8}

Supported Languages

Based on LaTeX/Source Code Listings, the package supports the following languages.

ABAP2,4, ACSL, Ada4, Algol4, Ant, Assembler2,4,
Awk4, bash, Basic2,4, C#5, C++4, C4, Caml4, Clean,
Cobol4, Comal, csh, Delphi, Eiffel, Elan, erlang, 
Euphoria, Fortran4, GCL, Go (golang), Gnuplot, 
Haskell, HTML, IDL4, inform, Java4, JVMIS, ksh, 
Lisp4, Logo, Lua2, make4, Mathematica1,4, Matlab, 
Mercury, MetaPost, Miranda, Mizar, ML, Modelica3, 
Modula-2, MuPAD, NASTRAN, Oberon-2, Objective C5, 
OCL4, Octave, Oz, Pascal4, Perl, PHP, PL/I, Plasm, 
POV, Prolog, Promela, Python, R, Reduce, Rexx, RSL, 
Ruby, S4, SAS, Scilab, sh, SHELXL, Simula4, SQL, 
tcl4, TeX4, VBScript, Verilog, VHDL4, VRML4, XML, XSLT

Code Styles

Here, we will see two different ways to use styles and environments: one is common and can be used for any language, another is defining custom style and environment for different languages.

Common Style

We can define common formatting for any language we want to include in our document.

\lstset{ 
  basicstyle=\small,        % the size of the fonts that are used for the code
  breaklines=true,                 % sets automatic line breaking
  commentstyle=\color{customgreen},    % comment style
  firstnumber=1,                % start line enumeration with line 1000
  frame=single,	                   % adds a frame around the code
  keepspaces=true,                 % keeps spaces in text, useful for keeping indentation of code (possibly needs columns=flexible)
  keywordstyle=\color{blue},       % keyword style
  numbers=left,                    % where to put the line-numbers; possible values are (none, left, right)
  numbersep=10pt,                   % how far the line-numbers are from the code
  numberstyle=\tiny\color{customgray}, % the style that is used for the line-numbers
  rulecolor=\color{black},         % if not set, the frame-color may be changed on line-breaks within not-black text (e.g. comments (green here))
  showspaces=false,                % show spaces everywhere adding particular underscores; it overrides 'showstringspaces'
  showstringspaces=false,          % underline spaces within strings only
  showtabs=false,                  % show tabs within strings adding particular underscores
  stepnumber=1,                    % the step between two line-numbers. If it's 1, each line will be numbered
  stringstyle=\color{custommauve},     % string literal style
  tabsize=2,	                   % sets default tabsize to 2 spaces
  title=\lstname                   % show the filename of files included with \lstinputlisting; also try caption instead of title
}

Now, include your code within the \begin{lstlisting}...\end{lstlisting} with defining the language you want to format with. For python, it will look like as follows:

\begin{lstlisting}[language=python]
class MyClass(Yourclass):
    def __init__(self, test):
        self.test = test
\end{lstlisting}

Or for a C program

\begin{lstlisting}[language=C]
#include <stdio.h>
int main() {
   // printf() displays the string
   printf("Hello, World!");
   return 0;
}
\end{lstlisting}

For adding an external file, we can use \lstinputlisting and define the language as well. For including an external python file, the code will look like as follows:

\lstinputlisting[language=python]{mypythonfile.py}

Custom Style

We can define custom styles and environments as well for different languages. In that case, first we will have to define a new style, for example, for python it might look like as follows

\DeclareFixedFont{\ttb}{T1}{txtt}{bx}{n}{9} % for bold
\DeclareFixedFont{\ttm}{T1}{txtt}{m}{n}{9}  % for normal

\newcommand\pystyle{\lstset{
language=Python,
basicstyle=\ttm,
morekeywords={self},          % Add more keywords here
commentstyle=\color{gray},
keywordstyle=\ttb\color{blue},
emphstyle=\ttb\color{red},    % Custom highlighting style
stringstyle=\color{green},
showstringspaces=false
}}

Then we have to define a new environment for python using a custom name (here we used python)

\lstnewenvironment{python}[1][]
{
\pystyle
\lstset{#1}
}
{}

This allows you to put your code inside

\begin{python}
	# your code goes here
\end{python}

This is how we can add custom environment for each and every language. However, this requires time to do that for every language.

That’s it for today! Cheers!!!

References

You can find a comprehensive list of Latex resources in the following post:

Latex Resources in a Nutshell

If you are a new Latex user, check out this post: 20 Most Common Mistakes Made by New Latex Users

You can find all Latex oriented posts of mine in: https://shantoroy.com/categories/#latex

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