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problems with textile

A key component of textpattern for me is the textile system of generating pages with simple text. As I described in simplifiedmarkup, systems like textile can really simplify the maintenance of a web site, and by doing so facilitate the expansion of content on the site. Textile was one of the reasons I initially chose textpattern for my content management system / blog software.

Textile is cool, but it is not perfect. My hunch is that textile is suffering from a greatly expanded charter, flawed design, and flawed implementation.

Before I go further, let me say that my goal is not to dis textile. I like it, though I’m a bit frustrated with it. I hope these problems get resolved, and I’m contemplating fixing them myself.

What’s wrong with textile? This is what I’ve noticed: I’m spending way too much time wrestling with textile. By “wrestling” I mean trying different things to get textile to render the way I want. This is important because the reason for textile is to save time. If I can do the same thing with hand coded html in less time, then I don’t need textile.

I’m going to list the problems as I encounter them. I’ll update this periodically with both new problems and, hopefully, fixes.

Textile problems:

Textile parsing and transforms are not well documented. There is a page where you can try it. There are examples. And there are small descriptions for various pieces. Normally I would consider this pretty good documentation, but when I am trying to resolve a problem I find myself looking all over the place for a hint.
I encounter various apparent parsing problems. Often things start working if I put a new line in at a strategic position.
As far as I can tell, there is no simple character escape. Sometimes you want to tell textile to simply display this exact character—don’t interpret it, don’t reformat it, don’t do anything with it.
At least one documented bug: alignment of images is broken.
On one page I can’t get a bulleted list to work correctly. The bulleted list has 2 levels. At various times the primary level (single *) gets displayed shifted right. This page displays this problem.
I have a table. Each column has a title. If the first column is empty, textile ignores it, messing up the alignment of the other columns.

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