This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Eric Stewart. Original Post: Up and running with RedCloth 2.0 Feed Title: Ponderings On Ruby Feed URL: http://blog.eric-stewart.com/category/programming-ruby.rss Feed Description: This is the Ruby related section of Eric Stewart's weblog. These entries will be the commentary of a long time Java/C++ programmer that started exploring Ruby in 2003. Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by Eric Stewart Latest Posts From Ponderings On Ruby

If you have followed my blog for any length of time you have probably seen a reference to Textile. I think this is a great attempt at a generally usable text formatting system for use in content management (and really anywhere html needs to be created by humans). It combines some of the benefits of WikiText with the capability to add style without really having to know HTML or worry about the problem if creating invalid html snippets.

Now whyTHEluckySTIFF has just announced version 2.0 of RedCloth, his Ruby library for parsing Textile text.

I had been using the previous version of RedCloth for a while on my weblog and looking at it for other projects. Since it only supported an older version of Textile for so long, I had begun to write my own Ruby utility for supporting Textile 2.0. It's great when I don't have to do that work!

To help test RedCloth 2.0, I created a simple test page where you can try it out. Just enter some Textile text in the top textbox, click the button and see what it generates.

I'm still thinking about continuing with the work I had started. There are many similar html generators out there besides Textile, such as reStructuredText (which is more general) and all the various Wiki formats out there. I'd love to see everything evolve toward something more common, but until then maybe conversion between them would be useful.