Textile 2 Character Macros Cheat Sheet

by Adam Messinger (e-mail)

Version: 1.2 (updates will be posted here)
Last Updated: November 18, 2004
Credits
Notes & Errata

Note: Some of these special characters will not display correctly in Internet Explorer. I know it sucks, but that’s just the way it is.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.
(why?)

Credits

I just slapped this together by analyzing some source code. The real credit belongs to the following people:

Dean Allen

Creator of the original Textile implementation

Brad Choate

Developer of the Textile 2 Perl module and Movable Type plugin

Jim Riggs

Translated Brad’s work into PHP

Adam Gessaman

Created a WordPress plugin from Jim’s PHP implementation of Textile

Notes & Errata

6-3-2004

The “{*}” macro actually produces the hex value for the bullet character (2022) rather than the correct decimal value (8226) like other macros in this set do ¹; using hex references for character display is not supported in most browsers (corrected, see below). I’ve filed bug reports with Brad Choate and Jim Riggs, and unless they tell me otherwise I’m including the decimal Unicode character entity (•) in this chart.

6-4-2004

Jim has fixed the problem with “{*}”.Roberto Antonio Ferreira De Almeida, who maintains PyTextile, has also fixed it in that implementation.

6-12-2004

In an effort to make this document easier to find for people who google for Textile documentation, I’ve re-arranged and re-titled the weblog post that introduced this little reference table to the world. These changes were inspired by John Gruber’s advice in “Writing for Google” on Daring Fireball. The URL of the post remains the same.

Also, some clarification may be in order as to why I’ve chosen the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license for this document rather than the GNU Free Documentation license. While it’s true that the intentions of the GFDL are more directly in line with my desire to allow others to reuse this reference table in their own documentation, it is also far too restrictive and/or vague in some areas for me to feel comfortable foisting its terms onto someone else. Even the Debian Project has some issues with the GFDL.

For more information on the possible drawbacks of the GFDL, read Nathanael Nerode’s article “Why You Shouldn’t Use the GNU FDL” or Wikitravel’s explanation of why their information isn’t covered by the license.

6-20-2004

Earlier this month, Adam Gessaman released an update to his WP-Textile plugin for WordPress. This update corrects the problem with the “{*}” macro. He’s set up a category on his weblog specifically to track changes to this plugin. You can find it here.

11-18-2003

I was contacted in early October by one Simon Lau, who was nice enough to inform me that my statement about browsers not supporting hex encoding (above, under 6-3-2004) was all wrong. It seems that when you properly format the character reference, it shows up just fine. The reason I was confused is that the hex reference which made its way into the Textile code was formatted like a decimal reference.

I assumed (and you know what they say about that) Brad had just looked at the wrong column in a character reference table, but it appears the formatting was off as well. Not that I'm knocking Brad by any means, though it is kind of nice to know that I'm not the only person who makes this kind of mistake. ;-)