Textile was the driving markup behind Textpattern (<a href="https://textpattern.com/" rel="nofollow">https://textpattern.com/</a>), one of the better publishing/CMS tools out there on PHP. It had a nice object oriented approach that was less painful than Wordpress, and gave great flexibility to design aspects in ways that were easier to work with than Wordpress... but Wordpress won the popular marketshare, and TP was relegated to some diehards. Those diehards still pump out fixes and features, and it's worth a look at <a href="https://github.com/textpattern/textpattern/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/textpattern/textpattern/</a> if you want to see something a bit different.
Does anyone actually care about the header levels (h1, h2, h3 ..) when writing text?<p>As far as I can tell, what you actually want is to denote a section and give it a header, and within the section you may want to denote sub sections.<p>Something like this:<p>@section {<p><pre><code> @title: This is my section title
Text, paragraph, etc.
@section {
@title: Subsection Title
Text, text, text.
}
</code></pre>
}<p>But I'm not aware of any markup language that lets you do this.
At least the tables (<a href="https://textile-lang.com/doc/tables" rel="nofollow">https://textile-lang.com/doc/tables</a>) are a bit too simplistic. Such tables are very confusing with longer contents and it is not possible to use it with nested markub like code blocks or bullet lists. That is much better with AsciiDoc (<a href="https://asciidoctor.org/docs/asciidoc-writers-guide/#a-new-perspective-on-tables" rel="nofollow">https://asciidoctor.org/docs/asciidoc-writers-guide/#a-new-p...</a>).
I don't quite follow what problem this solves.<p>The way I see it, Markdown is great for outputting simple text and readily used for that reason in the Wordpress blog space. Once you start needing more complex styling and formatting then i'd go for either Latex or HTML, both feature rich markup languages.<p>I use markdown for my everyday notes right now, and love it. The syntax is simple, fast to type either on mobile or desktop and pretty easy to read. Looking over the tag based syntax of Textile i'm not sure i'd have as easy a time using it for fast output... and if i'm wanting more style and moving to tags, I might as well use HTML... so what's the use case?
May I introduce Texti (Markup Language) - Text with Instructions (.texti) - Structured Documents in Text with Formatting Conventions - that tries to offer the best of all worlds - that is - markdown / textile / mediawiki markup/down / latex and more. See <a href="https://texti.github.io" rel="nofollow">https://texti.github.io</a> PS: An "important" building block missing in markdown / textile is built-in templates a la mediawiki markup/down. Lets you add "macros" for images or figures and so on (and much more). Extension and evolution is key - as always - and wins out in the long run.
Bit of a non sequitur but my first job was at an industrial embroidery company (did T-Shirts, hats, etc for big companies... sewed logos on thousands of shirts a day).<p>I was kind of hoping based on the name it would be for that. That industry is woefully lacking good open source and DIY tools for telling the machines what to sew.<p>But back on topic: I'm not sure what in this language would encourage me to move off of markdown at this point. It seems nice but the friction to use yet another markdown language (even if this one is older by 2 years it seems) is high.
TIL that Atlassian's Confluence (used at big corps for internal documentation) uses Textile, or something similar, for their text editor.<p><a href="https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/confluence-wiki-markup-251003035.html" rel="nofollow">https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/confluence-wiki-markup-...</a>
I adopted this years ago for writing app “help” content, for roughly the same reasons Markdown was invented (e.g. it was annoying to have to mark up almost every word in text that was <i>largely</i> plain content, and the ability to drop in HTML as needed was super convenient). Although .md files “won”, I still use .textile today.
Also see: Aftertext,
which separates markup from text<p><a href="https://breckyunits.com/aftertext.html" rel="nofollow">https://breckyunits.com/aftertext.html</a>
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29643313" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29643313</a>
Every time I look at markdown flavors I come up with this question: Why not latex? Granted, I rarely need markdown or latex so this might be just my ignorance.<p>I've tried doing my CV and some presentations in markdown cause I just didn't want to put the time to learn latex. I went markdown -> html -> pdf. I just couldn't get something satisfactory. The pains: pagination, centering, columns, image positioning, colors.<p>And then I took a day to learn enough latex - <a href="https://latex-beamer.com/quick-start/" rel="nofollow">https://latex-beamer.com/quick-start/</a> - to create a presentation for work. It was a lot easier than I thought and it came out looking great. Here is the skeleton of it so you can judge how complex it is:<p>\documentclass{beamer}<p>\usepackage{hyperref}<p>\usetheme {teheme-name}<p>\title{My Title}<p>\subtitle{My subtitle}<p>\author{me@example.com}<p>\date{\today}<p>\setlength{\parindent}{4ex}<p>\setlength{\parskip}{1ex}<p>\begin{document}<p>\begin{section}{Title}<p><pre><code> \begin{frame}
\titlepage
\end{frame}
\begin{frame}{Contents}
\tableofcontents
\end{frame}
</code></pre>
\end{section}<p>\begin{section}{Some section}<p><pre><code> \begin{frame}{Page title}
My text here
\begin{itemize}
\item one item
\item another item
\end{itemize}
\end{frame}
</code></pre>
\end{section}<p>\end{document}
The only thing I dislike about Textile is that it treats line breaks in the source code as <br> when it renders, which makes it annoying to edit in vim. Markdown is nicer in that one aspect. Otherwise, Textile is better (so of course it lost the popularity contest).
Finally, been hoping to see new innovations in the markup space. I like some of the syntax.<p>h6. or //h6 Is a lot more readable IMO than ######