A snippet to colorize TODO/DONE labels in Scribble

:: Racket, IT

I played with text properties in Scribble and produced red and green labels for todos:

One thing I like about Emacs’ Org-mode (a major mode for note taking, todo lists and everything else) is that it highlights any "TODO" or "DONE" labels. This makes it easy to get an overview what topics still have to be done. At the moment I am working in a small group and I organized our todo points and the resulting documents with Racket and Scribble (and at first with Org-Mode). I put all todo points in a Scribble document and added this small Racket snippet for green and red labels:

(define TODO-COLOR "black")
(define TODO-BACKGROUND "red")
(define DONE-COLOR "black")
(define DONE-BACKGROUND "green")
 
(define (todo/done-entry label txt color background)
(element (style #f (list (color-property color)
                         (background-color-property background)))
(if (string=? txt "")
    label
    (string-append label " (" txt "): "))))
 
(define (TODO [txt  ""])
(todo/done-entry "TODO" txt TODO-COLOR TODO-BACKGROUND))
 
(define (DONE [txt ""])
(todo/done-entry "DONE" txt DONE-COLOR DONE-BACKGROUND))

Therefore I get nice red and green labels:
  • DONE (Jack): Write specification for our new Great program.

  • TODO (John): Develop our new Great program

  • TODO Write user manual

I put the snippet in a Racket source file and included it with @(require "foo.rkt") but it’s of course possible to include it directly in a Scribble document.