Textile

Textile is ‘a humane web text generator.’

This, apparently, is what it can do:

1. Convert non-standard characters to HTML entities, ensuring proper display on different browsers and operating systems.
2. Offer (for now a fairly short list) of automatic conversions from plain text conventions left over from the manual typewriter to their typographic equivalents (two hyphens become an em dash, one hyphen surrounded by spaces becomes an en dash, etc.).
3. Ensure that problematic characters such as the ampersand are converted to an entity where necessary.
4. Convert straight single and double quote marks to their typographic ‘curled’ equivalents in readable text, while leaving quote marks required by HTML untouched.
5. Offer quick ways to delineate text structure, without typing out tags. Headers, list, and blockquote tags are wrapped automatically simply by typing two or three characters at the beginning of a paragraph. Paragraph tags and linebreaks are handled automatically.
6. Offer shortcuts to style text (bold, italic) that may save minutes over the course of a lifetime.
7. For the raised pinky set: automatic application of a CSS style called ‘caps’ to strings of three or more UPPERCASE letters.

Clever.

Posted at 6pm on 13/12/02 by Jack Mottram to the web category.
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