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MT-Textile

Follow-up with yesterday's validation of my blog, I've been asking for a text formatting option which could handle HTML special characters (for ISO 8859-1). Searching with HTML special char or HTML entity names didn't give me any good for MT solutions. After browsing through MT-plugins , and further searching, yeah, MT-Textile come to my solution.

MT-Textile is a port of original Textile project of Dean Allen. What really great is its integration of MT configuration. It'd just appear as an option of the text formating (add on to None and Convert Line Breaks), and allow you to set it to default option. In other words, it means I couldn't use client blogging tool like w.bloggar to enjoy the feature. It doesn't matter, I am using w.bloggar mainly for little helpful feature to encode links, format font....with MT-Textile, there are sweet little shortcut to achieve the same stuff. Even better, it put your hand stay on the keyboard :).

Just to quote some basic usages which I'd frequently use of Texttile:

• bq. A lowercase 'bq.' and a space will define a blockquote block.
  
• p. A lowercase 'p.' and a space will define a paragraph tag. This is the default if no other marker is specified.
  
• # A block beginning with '#' and a space will start a numbered list. Each additional new line beginning with a '#' and a space will become a new numbered item.
  
• * A block beginning with '*' and a space will start a bulleted list. Each additional new line beginning with a '*' and a space will become a new bulleted item.
  
• # _emphasis_: Text surrounded underscores will be formatted using the <em> tag.
  
• *strong* Text surrounded by asterisks will be formatted using the <strong> tag.
  
• "linktext":url Text within quotes followed with a colon and a URL (fully qualified or relative) will be formatted into a hyperlink. You can also add a title for the <a%gt; like this: "linktext (title)":url.
  

In addition to MT-Textile, John Gruber's Smartypants transform straight single quotes, double quotes, dashes, three consecutive dots to "smart" typographic punctuation HTML entities. I got it installed too.

I start realizing how powerful and helpful is MTMacro , what a great job Brad Choate has done. He got lots of great MT plugins. Thanks for the effor, Brad! Hint hint, whenever I am looking for some MT plugins solution, go for Brad first.