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Broader Cloth

Congrats and thanks to Alex Shiels for releasing an updated and much-fixed standalone version of Textile (the Humane Web Text Generator), which, in the PHP version that was circulating around in the past couple of years, was certainly starting to show its age. The new code remains tight and compact, and there’s a nice sprinkling of new features.

Textile: born out of a weekend’s groaning and fretting at a copy of Jeffrey Friedl’s excellent book on regular expressions, used by millions, and now in capable programming hands.


  1. I can’t believe no one else has commented before me on this, but this is awesome! This is by far my favorite Text mark-up generator. Thanks Dean for creating it (along with many other things) and Alex for maintaining it.

    Robert Simplicio    644 days ago    #
  2. Textile is definitely the bees knees, and Alex has done a stellar job building on your code base.

    I’m curious though – what’s Alex going to do with the superfluous d in his last name?

    Jeremy Amos    644 days ago    #
  3. Thanks Jeremy, the d has been redacted.

    Dean Allen    644 days ago    #
  4. I’ve always admired the design of Textile. I mostly use it through it’s Redcloth incarnation, so I’ll be missing out on the new features until I’m ready to deploy a TxP driven site I’m working on.

    I use both Markdown and Textile, but I use them for different purposes. I use Markdown for a private notebook, where I might want a plain text copy. Markdown really shines when you look at the marked-up text. But Textile is for book designers, where you’re interested in exactly specifying the final typographic form. Anytime I’m writing for a website I prefer Textile.

    Mark Adams    644 days ago    #
  5. I’m with Mark, we need to get _why onto upping his ruby library.

    Kjell    644 days ago    #
  6. Textile was what led me down this path in the first place…many ages ago.

    Look I just made a bona fide ellipses!

    Joel D    644 days ago    #

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