Our discussion fora use the Textile markup language. This page is a brief summary of Textile—there are also a number of references available1.

Overall

  • Separate paragraphs with blank lines
  • With a paragraph, a line break forces a new line in the output.
  • Within a paragraph use special character pairs for *bold*, _italic_, and @code font@.

Hyperlinks and Images

  • For simple links, use "some text":http://some.url
  • For more complex links, use regular <a href="...">...</a>
  • Include images with !http://image.url!

Lists

  • Create a bullet list by preceding each line with an asterisk
  • Create a numbered list by preceding each line with a #

Code

  • Inline, the <code>...</code> tag displays in a code font and disables interpretation of special character
  • For blocks of code, you need to next <code>...</code> inside pre tags:

<pre>
<code>
a = 1
b = 2
</code>

Quoting a Block of Text

  • Put bq. in front of the line containing the text to be quoted.

An Example

The textile input:
Fred said:

bq. I was confused by the second example. Wouldn't @var@
be set to @"cat"@?

This won't happen, because  Ruby strings are assigned by reference. 
In the following code:

<pre>
<code>
param = "cat" 
var = param
</code>
</pre>

@var@ and @param@ both point to the same string.  If you want a 
different String, you can:

* use the @dup@ method
* use a String constructor
* ...
The result:
Fred said:

I was confused by the second example. Wouldn’t var be set to "cat"?

This won’t happen, because Ruby strings are assigned by reference. In the following code:

param = "cat" 
var = param

var and param both point to the same string. If you want a different String, you can:

  • use the dup method
  • use a String constructor
  • ...

References

1 Here are some external links to reference material on Textile.