Nora Brown Design

Textile tips

Textile is an quick-to-pick-up markup system that can make formatting your blog post as fast and easy as typing. But it is picky too—one missed space, and things can go a little haywire. Here are a few tips:

Use square brackets for tight formatting

Sometimes you want some Textile formatting right up against other text, with no spaces around it. This can be accomplished using square brackets. For example, if we want 1[ ^st], simply writing 1^st^ does not work. The result is 1^st^. But if we had in some square brackets and a space like so: 1^st, we get what we came for.

Don’t forget spaces

When trying to make an unordered list, for example, each item starts with an asterisk followed by a space. If you leave off the space, Textile won’t recognize it. Likewise, block level elements like paragraphs and headings, must be preceded and followed by a blank line.

Some items require periods

Headings (h2., h3., etc.), blockquotes (bq.) and paragraphs (p.) — in general, markups that start with letters — all require periods, followed by a space.

Use Preview and your Textile Sandbox

I’ve written before about using the preview pane. It is very useful for checking your Textile formatting. I’ve recently been installing Textile sandboxes —a page to learn and experiment with Textile—on clients’ servers. If you would find one helpful, let me know.