Using EtText

Like most simple text markup formats (POD, setext, etc.), EtText markup handles the usual things: insertion of <P> tags, header recognition and markup. However it adds a powerful link markup system and several other useful features.

EtText markup is simple and effective; it's based loosely on setext, with bits of WikiWikiWebTextFormattingRules thrown in.

EtText was previously part of WebMake, but is now distributed as a standalone component.

If you leave blank lines between paragraphs, <p> and </p> tags will be inserted in the correct places. EtText does quite a good job of this.

Words wrap and fill automatically, so there's no need to worry about wrapping before 80 characters. (It's good form to do so anyway, in case other people ever need to edit your text, or you need to mail it around.)

A paragraph consisting of a line of 10 or more consecutive - or _ signs will be converted to a HR tag.

Sections of text between pairs of certain characters will be turned into markup, as follows:

EtText	Tag Used	Result
**text**	<strong>	text
__text__	<em>	text
##text##	<code>	text

& signs that have whitespace on either side will be converted to &amp; signs automatically.

Text indented from the left margin will be converted into a <P> paragraph wrapped in a <blockquote> -- unless it starts with a *, -, +, o character followed by whitespace, or is numbered -- 1., A) or a., etc. -- in which case it's interpreted as a list item; see Lists below.

Another exception to the above rule is that text indented by only 1 space, or on lines starting in the first column with two colon characters, will be surrounded by <pre> tags.

If you find writing HTML tag-pairs manually annoying, EtText includes an idea from Latte; balanced-tag generation. Wrap the text to be tagged with the name of the tag followed immediately by a { character on the left, and a } character on the right. In other words,

strong{text}

will be rendered as

<strong>text</strong>

or, in other words, text . This can be nested, so strong{text with i{italic} bits} will be rendered as text with italic bits.

In addition, the balanced-tag support has a bonus feature, in that it supports CSS classes; follow the name of the tag with a full stop and the class, and it will use that class, like so:

i.green{foo}

will be rendered as

<i class="green>foo</i>

Mail headers, and mail messages, are now marked up automatically.