Bold color text in the Command Window

A reader comment last week sent me on a short wild goose chase, that had an interesting and useful conclusion. The comment requested a way to display bold text in the Command Window, similarly to the way that we can display colored and underlined text using my cprintf utility.
Since Matlab release 7.13 (R2011b), the Matlab Command Window (CW) has the ability to display bold text. This is used, for example, when displaying the function name in the output of the help function (i.e., help(‘max’) will display the term ‘max’ in bold when displaying the help section). It therefore seemed a reasonable request to add this functionality to cprintf.

Attempt #1: use the underlying Java

I stated out investigating the relevant attributes used by the CW’s underlying Java component to display the text. It turns out that in addition to the three custom attributes used by Matlab in past releases, a fourth attribute called BoldStartTokens was added, which stored the relative position index of the bold text within each text element.
Unfortunately, this attribute contains an array of integer values, that get converted to a simple numeric array in Matlab. This means that unlike the SyntaxTokens attribute, which contains an array of Java String objects that can be modified one at a time (this is used by cprintf), the BoldStartTokens attribute value cannot be modified in a similar manner. Attempting to remove and add the attribute afresh (with modified values) failed due to a javax.swing.text.StateInvariantError: Illegal cast to MutableAttributeSet Java exception.
So unless I find a way to update the BoldStartTokens attribute values from Matlab, this looked like a dead end.

Attempt #2: follow the Matlab trail

My second attempt was to follow the Matlab trail, to see exactly what the help function does internally to format parts of the text as bold. Starting with help‘s m-file (%matlabroot%/toolbox/matlab/helptools/help.m), and step-by-step debugging, I quickly found out that the internal function prepareHelpForDisplay parses the help text and wraps the relevant terms with an HTML <strong> tag to make these terms appear bold.
We can easily use this information ourselves:

>> fprintf('not bold, <strong> bold </strong>\n')
not bold, bold     % the 'bold' term appears bolded

Matlab does have an internal limitation, of not allowing hyperlinks and bold formatting together. If both <a> and <strong> tags are present, then only the inner tag set is parsed.

Updating cprintf

Using <strong> is great, but apparently if we use the <strong> tag in cprintf, the output gets messed up – the HTML tag confuses cprintf. So I took the opportunity to update cprintf such that (1) it will not get confused by a <strong> tag, and (2) so that we could use ‘*’ in the style part (input argument #1) to specify bold format:

>> cprintf('*blue', 'this is bold\n')
this is bold     % this text appears bolded-blue