-----
title: "Textiling"
content-type: article
timestamp: 1145605143
tags: ""
-----
<p>Once upon a time I used <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBCode">BBcode</a>. CyberArmy and all its affiliated
	sites adopted it as <em>de-facto</em>
	standard for forums and articles, so consequently more or less all my articles are bbcoded. <br />
	I could copy and paste the <em>BBcodeHelper</em> I coded for this site, and it could be quite an interesting read
	for some people&#8230; well, tough luck: today I'd like to talk about Textile instead, which now I consider
	<em>the answer</em> to all
	text formatting problems.
</p>
<p>If what I wrote up to here doesn't make sense to you, I'm rambling about the apparent necessity and the
	undeniable need of web developers, content managers, and writers to use something else other than <span
		class="caps">HTML</span> for adding style and formatting text. What's wrong with <span class="caps">HTML</span>?
	Nothing, it's just too &#8220;tiresome&#8221; to use: you have to remember to
	close all tags, break lines, use the <code>&lt;strong&gt;</code> tag every time you want <strong>bold text</strong>,
	etc. etc.<br />
	Some people even freak out when you tell them that they have to use <span class="caps">HTML</span> in their text:
	&#8220;it's just <em>waaaaaay too difficult</em> to learn and use&#8221; &#8230;things like that.</p>
<p>Whether you are scared to learn <span class="caps">HTML</span>, you don't want to, or you know it but
	you're too lazy to seriously thinking about manually use a markup language to write your article, I can say
	that you'll definitely become addicted to Textile. What? <em>&#8220;<acronym
			title="What You See is What You Get"><span class="caps">WYSIWYG</span></acronym> <span
			class="caps">HTML</span> editors?&#8221;</em> &#8211; C'mon, let's at least <em>try</em> to be
	serious :)<br />
	Why BBcode doesn't help enough? Well, simply because I don't see why <code>[i]this[/i]</code> is easier
	than <code>&lt;i&gt;this&lt;/i&gt;</code>: unless you have a particular phobia for angular brackets, it seems quite
	similar to me!</p>
<p>What about <code>_this_</code> instead? You use only two additional characters instead of seven. <span
		class="caps">SEVEN</span>. If I only want italcized text I honestly can't imagine myself using more than
	two extra characters. It's natural. It's human.</p>
<p style="float:left;"><img src="/images/pictures/pear2.gif" alt="" /></p>
Precisely. Textile is a <em>&#8220;Humane web text generator&#8482;&#8221;</em>, it's simple, elegant and produces
standard compliant <span class="caps">XHTML</span> code. <a href="http://www.textism.com/about/">Dean Allen</a> should
be worshipped by entire generations of web developers for inventing something so easy to use and so <em>elegant</em> at
the same time. Maybe not worshipped, but for sure respected.
<p>I won't copy and paste the extremely useful <a href="http://cakeforge.org/projects/textilehelper/">TextileHelper</a>
	for CakePHP either, simply because
	it's 4085 lines long and it would be pointless: you can just get it and use it.</p>
<p>I'll just include some examples of textile formatting&#8230;</p>
<table>
	<tr>
		<td> <strong>Textile Code</strong> </td>
		<td> <strong>Result</strong> </td>
	</tr>
	<tr>
		<td> <code>*text*</code> </td>
		<td> <strong>bold</strong> text </td>
	</tr>
	<tr>
		<td> <code>_text_</code> </td>
		<td> <em>italicized</em> text </td>
	</tr>
	<tr>
		<td> <code>@text@</code> </td>
		<td> <code>fixed width</code> text</td>
	</tr>
	<tr>
		<td> <code>"text":url</code> </td>
		<td> <a href="/">linked</a> text </td>
	</tr>
	<tr>
		<td> <code>!path/to/image!</code> </td>
		<td> image </td>
	</tr>
</table>
<p>These are just some trivial examples. With textile you can also format text blocks, add custom <span
		class="caps">CSS</span> code and even float images or text! Tables? Sure, how do you think I created the table
	above?</p>
<pre><code>
| *Textile Code* | *Result* |
| @*text*@ | *bold* text |
| @_text_@ | _italicized_ text |
| &lt;code&gt;@text@&lt;code&gt;| @fixed width@ text|
| @"text":url@ | "linked":/ text |
| @!path/to/image!@ | image |
</code></pre>
<p>The simplest and most intuitive way possible!</p>
<p>Regardless, Textile is not perfect and may have some quirks, at least the CakePHP helper: the_undefined pointed out
	in a <a href="http://www.thinkingphp.org/2006/03/22/textile-a-personal-love-of-mine/">blog post</a> that external
	links are opened in the same window, so he provided a patch to the textile helper to handle this situation.<br />
	I also noticed that sometimes empty <code>style=""</code> and <code>class=""</code> attributed are generated, which
	don't do any particular harm, but they are not needed either&#8230; so here's a quick fix to improve
	your Textile experience in CakePHP: You can use this function ideally in your customized textile helper,
	<code>$data</code> should be the return value of TextileHelper's <code>process()</code> method.
</p>
<pre><code>
function _fixTextile($data)
{
  $patterns = array( '//', 
    '/style=""/', 
	'/class=""/', 
    '/  &gt;/');
  $replaces = array($this-&gt;base, 
    '', 
    '', 
    '&gt;');
  return preg_replace($patterns, $replaces, $data);  
}
</code></pre>