Thread: Newbie Question

If that's possible, I'm pretty sure you can't do that from the printf() function. Maybe one of the veterans here may have an idea for how to do that, though.

> do not know how to write colorful text, fat, cursive or underlined ...
That's beyond the scope of what printf does. To do what you want would require more than just a console mode program, and I wouldn't recommend that so soon after starting to learn C.

As Prelude said, printf simply writes plain text to standard output. However, certain platform independent methods have been devised to allow control codes to change the colour. A common standard for this is ANSI escape codes. Under MS-DOS (and possibly under a Windows DOS box) you need a driver ansi.sys loaded in order for them to work. See the link in this paragraph for more detail.

In C, under any terminal that supports ANSI codes, the following example will output some text in green and red. I have illustrated two ways, directly in printf, or using an escape string (ansi_esc). There also exists control codes for bold, et cetera.

Code:

#include <stdio.h>
int main(void)
{
    char ansi_esc[] = { 27, '[', 0 };
    printf("%s32mThis is green\n%sm", ansi_esc, ansi_esc);
    printf("\033[31mThis is red\n\033[m");
    return 0;
}