Change documentation color for help

I'd like to change the color that some of the documentation that is displayed when entering the command

help myfunction

function myfunc = afunction()
%my documentation
%DOCUMENTATION THAT I WOULD LIKE RED
functionstuff
end

Any way to do this?

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

No, there is no way to do that, not using help.

If you were using Live Scripts then you could embed Latex formatted comments and those could potentially have color information in them.

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/matlab_prog/insert-equations.html

Answer 2

[Baptiste Ottino]

It is not possible to do something like this for:

 help afunction

However, it is perfectly possible to do this for the ouput of

 doc afunction

which is more elegant, but it is a bit tricky. Here is how.

The idea is to directly use html tags inside your documentation. For this you have to open the help2html function

 edit help2html

and between lines 69 and 70 add

 helpstr = regexprep(helpstr,'&lt;','<');
 helpstr = regexprep(helpstr,'&gt;','>');

Which will ensure that html tags can be used in your help. Then, use the span tag to define the color:

 function myfunc = afunction()
 %my documentation
 %<span style="color:red">DOCUMENTATION THAT I WOULD LIKE RED</span>
 functionstuff
 end

For the following result:

Hope this helps.

EDIT:

I thought of a better solution. First, you can copy the help2html file and its 'private' directory above in the Matlab path to overload it, which is safer, second, instead of adding the lines I suggested, just comment line 25

 % helpstr = fixsymbols(helpstr);

[Walter Roberson]

(I touched up your code so that it shows up correctly. It is an oddity of the system that HTML named entities are translated into the designated entity even in code blocks, so when you wrote &lt; in your code, that gets translated to < . To get it to show up right you have to replace the & with &amp;

[Baptiste Ottino]

Thank you very much, it is good to know.