Why Should Anyone use Colours? or, Syntax Highlighting Beyond Code Snippets
It addresses the challenge of hard-to-parse papers for researchers and readers by promoting a tool to enhance dissemination, though it is incremental as it builds on existing highlighting practices.
This paper tackles the problem of underutilized syntax highlighting in research papers, arguing for its adoption as a standard to improve clarity and understandability, and suggests remedies for implementation issues in LaTeX.
Syntax highlighting in the form of colours and font diversification, is an excellent tool to provide clarity, concision and correctness to writings. Unfortunately, this practice is not widely adopted, which results in often hard-to-parse papers. The reasons for this lack of adoption is that researchers often struggle to embrace new technologies, piling up unconvincing motivations. This paper argues against such motivations and justifies the usage of syntax highlighting so that it can become a new standard for dissemination of clearer and more understandable research. Moreover, this paper reports on the criticism grounded on the shortcomings of using syntax highlighting in LATEX and suggests remedies to that. We believe this paper can be used as a guide to using syntax highlighting as well as a reference to counter unconvincing motivations against it.