Pierre has a quick post on his blog about the highlighting of PHP code in his blog entries and mentions some of the tools that can add it to your scripts.

Scripts and codes in my posts always look sad, gray. I knew there a syntax highliter plugin for dotclear. It works very well and is relatively fast (being in php...). This plugin uses GeSHi (Generic Syntax Highlighter), a porwerfull and easy library.

The other tools that he lists are: PeclColorer, PEAR TEXT_Highlighter, and Beautifier. Of course, there's always the PHP function highlight_string, but it's also not very full-featured. There are also plugins for other blogs as well, such as PHP Highlighter for Wordpress.

There's a project out there for those that might need a bit more to their syntax highlighting than the standard PHP functionality might allow. Enter GeSHi, the Generic Syntax Highlighter - and it's latest snapshot on it's development track to version 1.1.1.

GeSHi started as an idea to create a generic syntax highlighter for the phpBB forum system, but has been generalised to this project. GeSHi aims to be a simple but powerful highlighting class.

GeSHi supports PHP5 and Windows, and has even been used to highlight code on ASP pages. Numerous blogs, wikis and forums use GeSHi, including Dokuwiki, Mambo, phpBB and WikkiWiki.

From the development branch comes another snapshot on the way to 1.1.1. This one adds beginning support for VHDL, courtesy of Lingzi Xue and Java, thanks to Tim Wright.

You can check out the complete specs of the software here, or just download it and give it a try...