It’s been a few years since I fired up Blue Lacuna myself, I have to admit. Checking it out just now on my Mac, I see that Spatterlight displays the colored text, but Lectrote does not (don’t have easy access to Windows just now). The game was definitely designed to be playable without it, though, since color support in interpreters was (and is) inconsistent. I would personally just set all the styles to bold or whichever of the alternates is most distinct in the interpreter you’re using.
Re: the Inform 7 book: it’s been a source of frustration to me for years how bad the publisher has been at keeping it available. The good news is that I finally got the rights back to the text of the book: the bad news is that I need to re-do the layout and cover design to rerelease it (since the particular presentation of the Cengage release is part of their copyright). I also would really like to update it for modern Inform, which shouldn’t be too awful but will need to be done with some care not to break the incremental steps in building the example game and so on. Also, a lot of the references in the text (and frankly, in the example game itself) are a little dated now, and could stand being refreshed.
So in short, getting a new version of the book out is going to require an amount of work between “some” and “a lot” and I just haven’t had the spare bandwidth to focus on it yet. I do hear the interest from folks, though, and would really love to get a new version out there at some point-- just can’t promise when!