Stefano D’Archino did it again. First he made the Gedit syntax file, so you can get nice colors in your txt2tags source files. Now he made new syntax files for the following text editors: JOE, “le” and “ne”!

If you’re using one of these editors, install the Stefano files and enjoy your new colorful life :)

You can get those files at the tools page, in txt2tags website.

Chinese people, your wishes came true: the big Txt2tags User Guide is now available in your language!

Chris Leng (冷悦) worked hard to beat the monster, and the result is a beautiful 61-pages PDF with the full User Guide translated to Chinese (including the screenshots!).

Great work Chris, thanks!

Jendrik Seipp wrote me to tell about his diary application RedNotebook. As the website says:

RedNotebook is a graphical diary and journal to keep track of notes and thoughts. It includes a calendar navigation, customizable templates for each day, export functionality and word clouds. You can also format, tag and search your entries.

If you click at the image above, I guess you’ll recognize those === and ** from somewhere… :)

RedNotebook uses txt2tags markup to store the diary contents and also uses the txt2tags code to format it. It’s another nice example of a Python program using txt2tags as a module.

What about writing your notes using our beloved markup in that beautiful application? Give it a try!

The txt2tags user Huahai wrote a very nice article about txt2tags. In a few words, he/she (sorry!) gave a complete overview of the program, speaking about its advantages among other formats and about using it as a GTD tool.

“Speaking of portability, plain text is without question the king. So, when we need extra features, such as structure, list, table, links and so on, we add them on top of plain text. The question now becomes how much to add? Many formats trade power over simplicity. For example, LaTeX is great, many people I know write papers with LaTeX, myself included. However, LaTeX is too complex for quick text entry. Wiki is great for documentation, but there are just too many different kinds of wiki tags for me to remember. Here, I think txt2tags strikes the right balance between power and simplicity.”

[...]

“For quickly jotting down ideas, I have tried mind-mapping tools (freemind, kdissert), outliners (TVO, vimoutliners), and note-takers (basket, knotes). They work to some degree but are all very limited in term of content expandability and portability. I just wish I had found txt2tags earlier.”

Read the full Huahai article: txt2tags: a Lightweight Document Authoring Format

Hello Euskara readers!

Your friend Ales Zabala Alava has translated the Markup Demo and the Sample file for you.

The work is already online on the documentation page.

I am happy to announce that I have become an official Fedora Packager and effective today txt2tags is available from the Fedora Official repositories for Fedora 8 and Fedora 9 from the Updates repository and will be included in Fedora 10 as part of its initial release main repository.
— Adam Miller

Well, Adam said it all, start your yum engines!

yum install txt2tags

Seems like yesterday when we made five… But now we’re seven!

7 years!

To celebrate this very special date (it’s real hard to keep a spare-time one-man project like txt2tags for that long), there’s a new 2.5 version out there!

It’s not one. Not even two. But three new targets!

• Wikipedia
• Google Code Wiki
• DokuWiki

Maybe you’ll write an article on Wikipedia, maybe you’ll update your Google Code project or maybe you’ll edit some DokuWiki page. In any case, txt2tags is your friend!

Keep using the same **marks** //you// __already__ ``know`` and let txt2tags do the dirty job of converting them to those new targets. The new codes for the -t option are wiki, gwiki and doku. Enjoy!

Talking about marks, have you ever needed to strikeout something? Now you can! Txt2tags 2.5 brings a new mark: --strike--. Simple!

There’s also a new PHP interface, better UTF-8 support, local links for LaTeX, new tools and more!

Check out the new guide: How to add a new target to txt2tags. I guess the name is self-describing, right? How about to get involved to the project, adding a new target?

Talking about collaboration, this release was sponsored by a generous donation from Dmitri Popov, who runs the No Thick Manuals site and have already helped lots of open source projects. Thank you Dmitri!

What now? Try the new version (online) and download it.

Hello Finland and Finnish readers!

Your friend Mikko J Piippo from Helsinki has translated the Sample file and the program interface (potfile) for you.

The work is already online on the documentation page.

You know, HTMLDOC is a good tool to complement txt2tags features, specially to break an HTML file into multiple pages.

But the current version of HTMLDOC (1.8.x) has no Unicode support.

When you try to use it to convert or split an UTF-8 file, all the special characters (not ASCII) will be incorrect in the resulting HTML.

The Unicode support will be released on the 1.9 version, which is still in beta stage.

If you can’t wait for the stable 1.9 release or are stuck into an old version and just want a quick solution to your messed files, try my Python script:
fix-htmldoc-utf8.py

It restores the original UTF-8 characters that HTMLDOC has messed.

You can use it as a filter (reads STDIN, results to STDOUT):

cat myfile.html | fix-htmldoc-utf8 > myfile-ok.html

You can inform the file and send the results to STDOUT:

fix-htmldoc-utf8 myfile.html > myfile-ok.html

Or you can use the -w option fix the file in place:

fix-htmldoc-utf8 -w myfile.html

Enjoy!

I know, you have a beautiful website that rocks the neighborhood. The styles are all separated in nice CSS files. The contents are text files that you convert to HTML with txt2tags, of course!

It works just fine.

But everytime you edit some file, you have to remember to convert it to HTML. And maybe you also have to copy this updated file to your web server.

For just a few files you can do it by hand every time. But as the site grows, it’s easy to lose control.

Enter Dave Fancella’s gensite tool. It’s a Python program that detects which files has been modified and automatically converts them with txt2tags. It can also copy the generated HTML files to a new destination. You can use command line options and even create a configuration file to fit your conversion needs.

Go to Dave’s site for detailed information on WHY and HOW. Oh, and yes, his site is txt2tags powered :)