Semi-transparent highlights using PySide and QTextEdit

Question

I've created a QTextEdit object. The code below adds randomly colored highlights to the currently selected text. I need the highlights to be semi-transparent so I can see highlights layered upon each other. Using "setAlpha" does not appear to do anything. How can I set the alpha for the highlight or otherwise obtain semi-transparency?

# Define cursor & span    
self.cursor = self.textdoc.textCursor()
self.selstart = self.cursor.selectionStart()
self.selend = self.cursor.selectionEnd()
self.seltext = self.cursor.selectedText()

# Create random color
r = randint(0,255)
g = randint(0, 255)
b = randint(0, 255)
color = QColor(r,g,b)
color.setAlpha(125)
format = QTextCharFormat()
format.setBackground(color)
self.cursor.setCharFormat(format)

Answer 1

It seems unlikely that QTextEdit would support anything as sophisticated as layered formatting. So I think you will have to do the blending of colours yourself. The example below uses a fairly crude method, but it seems to work okay. I'm not exactly sure what results you're aiming for, but it should give you some idea how to proceeed:

import sys
from random import sample
from PySide import QtCore, QtGui

class Window(QtGui.QWidget):
    def __init__(self):
        super(Window, self).__init__()
        self.button = QtGui.QPushButton('Highlight', self)
        self.button.clicked.connect(self.handleButton)
        self.edit = QtGui.QTextEdit(self)
        self.edit.setText(open(__file__).read())
        layout = QtGui.QVBoxLayout(self)
        layout.addWidget(self.edit)
        layout.addWidget(self.button)

    def blendColors(self, first, second, ratio=0.5, alpha=100):
        ratio2 = 1 - ratio
        return QtGui.QColor(
            (first.red() * ratio) + (second.red() * ratio2),
            (first.green() * ratio) + (second.green() * ratio2),
            (first.blue() * ratio) + (second.blue() * ratio2),
            alpha,
            )

    def handleButton(self):
        cursor = self.edit.textCursor()
        start = cursor.selectionStart()
        end = cursor.selectionEnd()
        if start != end:
            default = QtGui.QTextCharFormat().background().color()
            color = QtGui.QColor(*sample(range(0, 255), 3))
            color.setAlpha(100)
            for pos in range(start, end):
                cursor.setPosition(pos)
                cursor.movePosition(QtGui.QTextCursor.NextCharacter,
                                    QtGui.QTextCursor.KeepAnchor)
                charfmt = cursor.charFormat()
                current = charfmt.background().color()
                if current != default:
                    charfmt.setBackground(self.blendColors(current, color))
                else:
                    charfmt.setBackground(color)
                cursor.setCharFormat(charfmt)
            cursor.clearSelection()
            self.edit.setTextCursor(cursor)

if __name__ == '__main__':

    app = QtGui.QApplication(sys.argv)
    window = Window()
    window.setGeometry(800, 100, 600, 500)
    window.show()
    sys.exit(app.exec_())

(PS: one thing I haven't attempted to implement here is removing highlights. If you used a relatively small set of colours, I suppose you could pre-compute a table of all colour combinations, and then use a key of (current_color, removed_color) to look up the required "subtracted" colour).