Comment 76 for bug 295014

Any GSoC participants who want to know what happens when they press the highlight toolbar button should review the SfxDispatcher mechanism. It calls on SfxTextShell::Execute(), the slot that it uses is SID_ATTR_CHAR_COLOR_EXT on line 1190 of sw/source/core/ui/textsh1.cxx.

I hope that helps a little bit. You'll probably also need to look at how Word handles highlighting in the docx format. I'll leave that as an exercise for the student :-)

Incidentally, if you ever want to work out what a button uses, then put a breakpoint on SfxDispatcher::Execute - that's how I worked out this.