Textile 2

Kevin February 4, 2004 Blogging Matters 7 Comments

Brad Choate has just released MT Textile 2. If you want to see the cool text feature that are easy to implement with Textile 2, go here.

I’m now a big fan of MT Textile, but I swear I need a cheat sheet next to the monitor to remember all the formatting options.

Kevin founded Wizbang in 2003. He still contributes occasionally and handles all the technical and design work for the site.

James Joyner February 4, 2004

I have it installed but mainly just so that I can use SmartyPants to automatically take care of the em dashes, hypens, and such.
Kevin February 4, 2004

That’s how I started, but once I saw I could do other things I was hooked.
Fritz February 4, 2004

Woo hoo! Now I have something to do tonight besides watch Part 2 of the Hollywood round on American Idol!
Venomous Kate February 4, 2004

Ok, maybe I’m missing something but… couldn’t we do all of that with HTML tags before?
Matthew Stinson February 5, 2004

You can, Kate, but if you learn the Textile syntax coding is faster. The rub, of course, is that you have to learn the Textile syntax, which for many people will extract a higher opportunity cost than just using old-fashioned HTML 🙂
Chris Lawrence February 6, 2004

I use Textile (well, PyTextile) for all my blogging, and it’s very cool. At some point I’ll probably end up porting the Textile 2 syntax myself, since Mark Pilgrim has orphaned the PyTextile project.
Adam M. June 5, 2004

For the WordPress users out there, Adam Gessaman has released a WordPress plugin for Textile 2 that emulates all of Choate’s features. It’s based on Jim Riggs’s PHP port of Brad’s Perl module.

In part because they weren’t very well documented, I just made up a comprehensive reference table for the 157 handy character replacement macros in Textile 2 (e.g. {Y=} produces the Yen symbol). You can find that here.