Introduction

Textile is a lightweight, humane web text generator. It transforms simple plain text to valid XHTML. For example:

A sentence with *bold* text and "a link":http://thresholdstate.com/.

produces:

A sentence with bold text and a link.

It includes a “smart quotes” feature that transforms plain typewriter quotation marks and apostrophes (" and ') into typographically correct punctuation:

"A quotation containing 'another quotation'."

produces:

“A quotation containing ‘another quotation’.”

Why use Textile?

Textile offers benefits to authors, designers and developers.

Authors can stop worrying about difficult and technical markup syntax and get on with the job of writing text. Textile syntax often corresponds to commonly used ASCII shorthand such as *asterisks* for emphasis and (tm) for trademarks™.

Designers can use Textile’s standards-compliant XHTML output to display clean, well-formatted and typographically-rich text. Textile automatically produces valid XHTML with CSS classes for easy styling.

Developers can easily include Textile in any web application that accepts user input for display on web pages. Textile supports UTF-8 input, and produces valid XHTML. A “Restricted” mode is available for processing input from untrusted users, where invalid input and XSS attacks are a risk.

Textile versions

This guide describes the PHP version of Textile 2.0, as published at Threshold State. This is a direct descendent of Dean Allen’s original Textile code, as included in the Textpattern content management application. It is published and maintained as a standalone package by Alex Shiels, and included in recent Textpattern releases (4.0.4+).

There are several other versions of Textile available, including:

• Brad Choate’s MT-Textile 2, written in Perl
• Jim and Lissa’s TextilePHP, an alternative PHP implementation
• RedCloth, a Ruby implementation

Other versions vary in syntax and capabilities. Not all of the syntax described in this guide will work on versions other than Textile 2.0.

Though both are written in PHP, Textile 2.0 and Textile PHP are entirely independent implementations. Textile 2.0 evolved from Dean Allen’s original code. Textile PHP was ported to PHP from Brad Choate’s Perl version. Internally it bears little resemblance to Dean’s version. Textile 2.0 is rather more compact: it’s about one-third of the code size of Textile PHP, excluding comments.

Reading this guide

Textile markup is illustrated by example. Each example shows the original Textile input, the result as displayed in a web browser, and the raw output XHTML:

Textile input	Browser display
	<p>Raw XHTML</p>

This reference guide is processed using Textile 2.0.0. All output examples are shown exactly as produced by Textile itself. This guide will be updated from time to time to reflect additions and changes to its syntax and output.

Testing Textile

An online Textile preview application is maintained at http://textile.thresholdstate.com/. It uses the same version of Textile as is described in this document.

The Textile preview includes a bug reporting mechanism. If you believe you’ve found a bug in Textile, please try reproducing the problem there. If the problem does occur, follow the instructions to report it as a bug.

Regrettably, we are unable to respond to all bug reports. If you have an urgent problem or require commercial technical support, Threshold State offers priority support contracts for Textile and other web software.