Native way to highlight text

rahul24 · Post by **rahul24** » Thu Sep 20, 2012 10:49 am

I want to highlight small portions of text (like 2-3 key words or a perhaps sentence (inline in a paragraph or standard environment)) in Lyx so that the highlight is visible on-screen. For the latex output I simply use \colorbox{}{} but this only appears on paper/pdf. Is there a native way to do this Lyx so that I can see the highlighted portion on-screen and not have to use an ERT for latex output.

Any answers????

Thanks in advance,
Rahul

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Post by **scottkosty** » Sat Sep 22, 2012 7:33 am

rahul24 wrote:I want to highlight small portions of text (like 2-3 key words or a perhaps sentence (inline in a paragraph or standard environment)) in Lyx so that the highlight is visible on-screen. For the latex output I simply use \colorbox{}{} but this only appears on paper/pdf. Is there a native way to do this Lyx so that I can see the highlighted portion on-screen and not have to use an ERT for latex output.

Any answers????

You're half-way there already with knowing how to use \colorbox. I don't know if you consider this solution "native" to LyX (LaTeX is really doing the rendering) but it should do what you want.

Enter your \colorbox command using ERT, then, highlight the ERT box and go to Insert > Preview
You should see a black box around your red ERT box.

Then go to Tools > Preferences > Look & Feel > Display and set "Instant Preview" to "On". You might have to click inside the black box and then out again because you're just enabling it.

rahul24 · Post by **rahul24** » Mon Oct 01, 2012 8:39 am

Thanks for the solution. Its a bit convoluted but does the job!!!!!

Post by **scottkosty** » Mon Oct 01, 2012 8:45 am

rahul24 wrote:Thanks for the solution. Its a bit convoluted but does the job!!!!!

Glad to hear that it's at least a bearable solution!

poliorcetes · Post by **poliorcetes** » Wed Oct 15, 2014 7:33 pm

Thanks for this amazing Preview notice.

I am a long-term user of LyX. I was so used to the old interface of versions 1.x than I didn't pay attention of this wonderful real-time preview. Great!

Now, if you people want to highlight text, \colorbox is not a great solution since it interferes greatly with text boxes and above all line heights. There is a better solution:

In the preamble, use:
\usepackage{soul}

and inside text body, if you want to highlight properly, just do this

\hl{highlighted text}

LaTeX.org

LyX ⇒ Native way to highlight text