LaTeX, Can't color text

Question

To be honest i don't know what the problem is, i just can't seem to get any of my text colored.

I made an example file to show you some demonstation of the problem:

     \documentclass[a4paper,11pt,dvips]{article}
     \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
     \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
     \usepackage[british]{babel}
     \usepackage{color}
     \usepackage{xcolor}

     \begin{document}

     \emph{some black text, {\color{red}followed 
      by a red fragment}, going black again.}
     \begin{itemize}
      \color{blue}
      \item Firts item
      \item Second item
       \end{itemize}

       \noindent
       {\color{red}}
       \textcolor{red}{easily}
       \end{document}`

This gives the following output:

            some black text, followed by a red fragment, going black again. 
            Firts item 
            Second item
            easily

As you can see, nothing has changed. Im running it with Quick Build in TexMaker(Have no ide if that makes a difference). And im not getting any errors.

Any help or advice would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

It's dvipsnames

\documentclass[a4paper,11pt,dvipsnames]{article}
     \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
     \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
     \usepackage[british]{babel}
     \usepackage{color}
     \usepackage{xcolor}

     \begin{document}

     \emph{some black text, {\color{red}followed
      by a red fragment}, going black again.}
     \begin{itemize}
      \color{blue}
      \item Firts item
      \item Second item
       \end{itemize}

       \noindent
       {\color{red}}
       \textcolor{red}{easily}
       \end{document}

Answer 2

Your QuickBuild uses pdflatex for the compilation of the text. But the option dvips means that you are using latex->dvips->ps2pdf. It is the wrong driver for pdflatex. Simply delete that option and everything will be fine.

Answer 3

If you can use pdflatex, the following simple modification does the work.

%\documentclass[a4paper,11pt,dvips]{article}
\documentclass[a4paper,11pt]{article}
     \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
     \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
     \usepackage[british]{babel}
     \usepackage{color}
     \usepackage{xcolor}

     \begin{document}




     \emph{some black text, {\color{red}followed 
      by a red fragment}, going black again.}
     \begin{itemize}
      \color{blue}
      \item Firts item
      \item Second item
       \end{itemize}

       \noindent
       {\color{red}}
       \textcolor{red}{easily}
       \end{document}