RedCloth is a module for using Textile in Ruby. Textile is a text format. A very simple text format. Another stab at making readable text that can be converted to HTML.

Homepage: http://redcloth.org/

User Reference: http://redcloth.org/textile/

API docs: http://redcloth.rubyforge.org/

Development: http://github.com/jgarber/redcloth/

Install

gem install RedCloth

This will install RedCloth 4, the latest version. Make sure you’re typing RedCloth in camel case. gem install redcloth will not work.

Using textile

The easiest way to test that things are working is to put something like this in one of your views:

<%= RedCloth.new(“h1. This is a test of textile\n\nParagraph\n\nAnother paragraph\n\n* Bullets”).to_html %>

This is a test of textile


	
Paragraph
	
Another paragraph

	
Bullets

Problems and bugs

If you’re having problems, check which version you’re running:

$ irb -rubygems
> require 'redcloth'
=> true
> RedCloth::VERSION::STRING
=> "4.0.0"

$ irb -rubygems
> require 'redcloth'
=> true
> RedCloth::VERSION
=> "3.0.4"

If you’re running less than 4, consider upgrading. RedCloth 3.x troubleshooting can be found at RedCloth3

The RedCloth 4 bug tracker is hosted on Lighthouse

Alternatives to RedCloth and Textile

Another similar text format is Markdown, created by John Gruber The rails plugin BlueCloth makes it easy to use Markdown in your rails apps.

Basic HTML is considered to be another alternative to textile/markdown markup languages (“Some HTML is OK” as used in Flickr comments).
AnyExample.com has article with simple regexp-based function
ae_some_html that allows usage of small, safe subset of HTML.