How to add color to Github s README md file

Question

I have a README md file for my project underscore-cli  a pretty sweet tool for hacking JSON and JS on the command-line  and I want to document the --color flag  Currently  the ONLY way to do this is with a screenshot  which can be stored in the project repo    But screenshots aren t text  preventing readers from copy pasting the command in the screenshot  They re also a pain to create   edit   maintain  and are slower for browsers to load  The modern web uses text styles  not a bunch of rendered images of text   While some markdown parsers support inline HTML styling  Github doesn t  This doesn t work   lt span style  quot color  green quot  gt  Some green text  lt  span gt   This doesn t work   lt font color  quot green quot  gt  Some green text  lt  font gt    Below  you ll find clever answers with some creative hacks    Unicornist  Using emojis as colored bullets    -- this is one of the better ideas  but is near the bottom  so consider giving it a vote   Luke Hutchison  makes a similar suggestion  but Unicornist has a better selection of emoji bullets to choose from    AlecRust  Using a placeholder image service to render colored squares -- this predates the emoji solution  but solves a similar problem  It s more flexible on color  but less flexible on shape  and requires fetching an image from an external service  so really  it s just a screenshot that you can create programmatically    Vladimir Panteleev  using text rendering instructions in an SVG file  which is fewer bytes than a screenshot image  but has the same downside  no copy paste support  Kind of neat though  makes me think I should play with SVG more    craigmichaelmartin  Abusing the DIFF color scheme to color entire lines in one of  5 different colors -- caveat  requires including an extraneous initial character to trigger coloration  but incorporating that character into text like  quot -  Warning  - quot  is a really clever hack to hide it    ling  hacked up an entire text coloration service  although this seems more operationally fragile than just using pre-rendered screenshots     There s still no solution for the general case of coloring arbitrary structured text After upvoting this question and a few of the better answers  consider adding your  1 to the GitHub feature request  https   github com github markup issues 1440

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I m inclined to agree with Qwertman that it s not currently possible to specify color for text in GitHub markdown  at least not through HTML    GitHub does allow some HTML elements and attributes  but only certain ones  see their documentation about their HTML sanitization   They do allow p and div tags  as well as color attribute  However  when I tried using them in a markdown document on GitHub  it didn t work  I tried the following  among other variations   and they didn t work     lt p style  color red  gt This is some red text  lt  p gt     lt font color  red  gt This is some text  lt  font gt  These are  lt b style  color red  gt red words lt  b gt     As Qwertman suggested  if you really must use color you could do it in a README html and refer them to it

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Here is the code you can write color texts  lt h3 style  quot color  ff0000 quot  gt Danger lt  h3 gt

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I added some color to a GitHub markup page using emoji Enicode chars  e g   or  -- some emoji characters are colored in some browsers  There are also some colored emoji alphabets  blood types      parking sign    Metro sign     a few others with two or more letters  such as   and boxed digits such as 0    Flag emojis will show as letters  often colored  if the flag is not available             However  I don t think there is a complete colored alphabet defined in emoji

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Unfortunately  this is currently not possible   The GitHub Markdown documentation has no mention of  color    css    html   or  style    While some Markdown processors  e g  the one used in Ghost  allow for HTML  such as  lt span style  color orange   gt Word up lt  span gt   GitHub s discards any HTML   If it s imperative that you use color in your readme  your README md could simply refer users to a README html  The trade-off for this  of course  is accessibility

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As of writing  Github Markdown renders color codes like   ffffff   note the backticks   with a color preview  Just use a color code and surround it with backticks   For example     becomes

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It s worth mentioning that you can add some colour in a README using a placeholder image service  For example if you wanted to provide a list of colours for reference   -    f03c15  https   via placeholder com 15 f03c15 000000 text      f03c15  -    c5f015  https   via placeholder com 15 c5f015 000000 text      c5f015  -    1589F0  https   via placeholder com 15 1589F0 000000 text      1589F0    Produces      f03c15   c5f015   1589F0

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As an alternative to rendering a raster image  you can embed a SVG file    lt a gt  lt img src  http   dump thecybershadow net 6c736bfd11ded8cdc5e2bda009a6694a colortext svg   gt  lt  a gt    You can then add color text to the SVG file as usual    lt  xml version  1 0  encoding  utf-8   gt   lt svg version  1 1        xmlns  http   www w3 org 2000 svg       xmlns xlink  http   www w3 org 1999 xlink       width  100  height  50   gt     lt text font-size  16  x  10  y  20  gt       lt tspan fill  red  gt Hello lt  tspan gt        lt tspan fill  green  gt world lt  tspan gt      lt  text gt   lt  svg gt    Unfortunately  even though you can select and copy text when you open the  svg file  the text is not selectable when the SVG image is embedded   Demo  https   gist github com CyberShadow 95621a949b07db295000

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You can use the diff language tag to generate some colored text      diff - text in red   text in green   text in orange   text in gray    text in purple  and bold          However  it adds it as a new line starting with either -       or starts and ends with       This issue was raised in github markup  369  but they haven t made any change in decision since then  2014

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These emoji characters are also useful if you are okay with this limited variety of colors and shapes  though they may look different in different OS browsers   This is an alternative to AlecRust s answer which needs an external service that may go down someday  and with the idea of using emojis from Luke Hutchison s answer                              There are also many colored rectangle characters with alphanumeric arrow other-symbols that may work for you  Also  the following emojis are skin tone modifiers that have the skin colors inside this rectangular-ish shape  Don t use them  Because they should be alone   otherwise they may modify the output of the sibling emojis  and also they are rendered so much different in different os version browser version combination when used alone

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lt span color  quot red quot  gt red lt  span gt     bin bash    convert ansi-colored terminal output to github markdown    to colorize text on github  we use  lt span color  quot red quot  gt red lt  span gt  etc   depends on  aha  xclip   license  CC0-1 0   note  some tools may need other arguments than  --color always    sample use  colors-to-github sh diff a txt b txt  cmd  quot  1 quot  shift       echo   lt pre gt        cmd --color always  quot    quot  2 gt  amp 1   aha --no-header     echo   lt  pre gt         sed -E  s  lt span style  quot    quot   color      quot      quot   lt span color  quot  1 quot  g      sed -E  s  style  quot    quot    quot   g      xclip -i -sel clipboard  trivial

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You cannot color plain text in a GitHub README md file  You can however add color to code samples with the tags below   To do this just add tags such as these samples to your README md file       json       code for coloring        html       code for coloring        js       code for coloring        css       code for coloring        etc    No  pre  or  code  tags needed   This is covered in the GitHub Markdown documentation  about half way down the page  there s an example using Ruby    GitHub uses Linguist to identify and highlight syntax - you can find a full list of supported languages  as well as their markdown keywords  over in the Linguist s YAML file

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Based on  AlecRust idea  I did an implementation of png text service   The demo is here   http   lingtalfi com services pngtext color cc0000 amp size 10 amp text Hello 20World  There are four parameters    text  the string to display font  not use because I only have Arial ttf anyway on this demo  fontSize  an integer  defaults to 12  color  a 6 chars hexadecimal code   Please do not use this service directly  except for testing   but use the class I created that provides the service   https   github com lingtalfi WebBox blob master Image PngTextUtil php  class PngTextUtil                  Displays a png text                Note  this method is meant to be used as a webservice                Options         ------------        - font  string   arial Arial ttf                 The font to use                  If the path starts with a slash  it s an absolute path to the font file                  Else if the path doesn t start with a slash  it s a relative path to the font directory provided                 by this class  the WebBox assets fonts directory in this repository          - fontSize  int   12                 The font size         - color  string   000000                 The color of the text in hexadecimal format  6 chars                   This can optionally be prefixed with a pound symbol                                                        param string  text         param array  options         throws  Bat Exception BatException         throws WebBoxException             public static function displayPngText string  text  array  options        void               if  false     extension loaded  gd                  throw new WebBoxException  The gd extension is not loaded                       header  Content-type  image png             font    options  font       arial Arial ttf            fontsize    options  fontSize      12           hexColor    options  color       000000           if          substr  font  0  1                  fontDir     DIR          assets fonts                font    fontDir          font                     rgbColors   ConvertTool  convertHexColorToRgb  hexColor             --------------------------------------------            GET THE TEXT BOX DIMENSIONS           --------------------------------------------          charWidth    fontsize           charFactor   1           textLen   mb strlen  text            imageWidth    textLen    charWidth    charFactor           imageHeight    fontsize           logoimg   imagecreatetruecolor  imageWidth   imageHeight           imagealphablending  logoimg  false           imagesavealpha  logoimg  true            col   imagecolorallocatealpha  logoimg  255  255  255  127           imagefill  logoimg  0  0   col            white   imagecolorallocate  logoimg   rgbColors 0    rgbColors 1    rgbColors 2      for font color          x   0           y    fontsize           angle   0           bbox   imagettftext  logoimg   fontsize   angle   x   y   white   font   text     fill text in your image          boxWidth    bbox 4  -  bbox 0            boxHeight    bbox 7  -  bbox 1           imagedestroy  logoimg             --------------------------------------------            CREATE THE PNG           --------------------------------------------          imageWidth   abs  boxWidth            imageHeight   abs  boxHeight            logoimg   imagecreatetruecolor  imageWidth   imageHeight           imagealphablending  logoimg  false           imagesavealpha  logoimg  true            col   imagecolorallocatealpha  logoimg  255  255  255  127           imagefill  logoimg  0  0   col            white   imagecolorallocate  logoimg   rgbColors 0    rgbColors 1    rgbColors 2      for font color          x   0           y    fontsize           angle   0          imagettftext  logoimg   fontsize   angle   x   y   white   font   text     fill text in your image         imagepng  logoimg     save your image at new location  target         imagedestroy  logoimg             Note  if you don t use the universe framework  you will need to replace this line    rgbColors   ConvertTool  convertHexColorToRgb  hexColor     With this code    rgbColors   sscanf  hexColor    02x 02x 02x      In which case your hex color must be exactly 6 chars long  don t put the hash symbol     in front of it    Note  in the end  I did not use this service  because I found that the font was ugly and worse  it was not possible to select the text  But for the sake of this discussion I thought this code was worth sharing

[github] How to add color to Github's README.md file

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