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1.2 Built-in versus separate styling

There are generally two approaches for adding styling to text:

• The program that generates the text adds the styling. It does so through interleaved statements that turn on or off specific attributes.
• The styling gets added by a separate program, that postprocesses the output. This separate program usually uses regular expressions to determine which text regions to style with a certain set of text attributes.

The first approach produces a styling that is 100% correct, regardless of the complexity of the text that is being output. This is the preferred approach for example for JSON, XML, or programming language text.

The second approach works well if the output has a simple, easy-to-parse format. It may produce wrong styling in some cases when the text format is more complex. This approach is often used for viewing log files.

GNU libtextstyle supports both approaches; it includes an example program for each of the two approaches.