Mfcttrf

My question below is my attempt to reduce a problem I am having to the simplest possible version that will show the error I am trying to fix. I recognize that the coding looks tortured, and I will provide at the end an explanation for why I am doing it this way, but hopefully we can just focus on the particular behavior in my abstracted example.

(copyable version below)

CellPrint @ ExpressionCell[
 "!(*SubscriptBox[(H), (2)])O (H)",
 "Input",
 ShowStringCharacters->False
]

Why is the "O (g)" black and the rest of the string grey? And how do I change it so that it all displays as black?

Background: This is a follow-up to this thread. I am using the strings as a way to define palette-selectable labels that preserve non-Mathematica-standard notation that I can then use with the Notation package to associate this alternate notation (both input and output) with more standard symbols that can be used internally. I need the label to be in a string so that the notational form is maintained without parsing once it is interpreted by a ParsedBoxWrapper@TemplateBox, and I use a custom style to suppress the display of those quotation marks.

Edit: I originally had this including """<>string<>""", but have since discovered that the extra quotes aren't necessary to make the problem happen.

Short answer: You need to turn off auto styles:

CellPrint @ ExpressionCell[
 "!(*SubscriptBox[(H), (2)])O (H)",
 "Input",
 ShowStringCharacters->False,
 ShowAutoStyles->False
]

The issue is that your string, inside of an "Input" cell is not interpreted as a string, it is interpreted as an expression, and so the default syntax coloring happens.