Text Formatting Codes

[BenCheung0422]

Original: MinicraftPlus/minicraft-plus-revived#392
Requires #26

Background

If we want the style of text looks different, it is restricted to using Unicode codes, and only colors are available, accessibility is quite limited and thus difficult to use. Also, we now have #6 for some special formatting codes. This should not be limited to just coloring when we have the ability for allowing more text styling.

Details

This feature or functionality would generally available globally, but only for rendering or displaying purposes. This would to enhance customizable visual control elements for texts. May refer to Minecraft's implementation and ANSI Select Graphic Rendition (SGR) for implementation details. Since a typeable, uncommon and displayable character must be used, it would still stick with the section sign (§). However, since it is a display character, one code for literal character should be available, which may be §§ like %% in formatter. Here, % is for parameterized texts, so it acts differently, but it might still be available for some functions.

It should not be error-prone. So, to keeping the usability of the codes without ruining the visual experience, unparsable codes will remain literal and not used for styling. This way, it could also inform the user that, the code is invalid, since it is remained literal in rendering.

For extensibility of formatting codes, allowing variety of styling, the implementation might be similar to the SGR. Specifically, they would less likely be just one-character codes, especially when color codes could be supported.

Examples

Format: §<sequences>;

<sequences> can contain one or more formatting codes with colon (:) separators. Likely they are mostly numbers instead of letters due to extensibility, unless there would be options for particular styles.

Sequence	Name	Note
0	Reset	Clear all attributes
1	Bold
2	Italic
3	Underline
4	Strikethrough
11	Not bold	Clear bold attribute if it is set
12	Not italic	Clear italic attribute if it is set
13	Not underline	Clear underline attribute if it is set
14	Not strikethrough	Clear strikethrough attribute if it is set
20	Reversed	Reverse video
21	Not reversed	Clear reversed attribute if it is set
30	Default foreground color	Clear set foreground color attribute
31- c	Set foreground color	Set foreground color by 0-f as seen in Minecraft's one
32	Default background color	Clear set background color attribute
33- c	Set background color	Set background color by 0-f as seen in Minecraft's one

Format: §^<code>;

This would help inputting some special characters, but also help displaying.

Code	Character
0	§
1	(EM SPACE)

Different ideas are welcome, even using a different format of control sequent codes.

See Also

• Writable Books #27