apped.design

by David South Jr

RedCloth doesn’t properly parse correctly. A big problem is the way it handles dashes. A double dash -- is supposed to be converted to an em dash. However, if you use two double dashes in a sentence -- like how Freda commonly does and like I am doing now -- it converts them into a strike. Yuck. Strike is so rarely used. This - is how it looks - with two double hyphens.

Apparently there is a new SuperRedCloth by Why the Lucky Stiff.

You need to install ragel.

On the Mac with darwin ports:

$ sudo port install ragel

On Ubuntu/Debian:

$ sudo aptitude install ragel

To install the redcloth gem:

$ sudo gem install superredcloth --source http://code.whytheluckystiff.net

SuperRedCloth is under active development so it pays to keep the gem up-to-date. According to the SuperRedCloth Wiki, the gem is always a few days behind. So compiling from source may be useful:

$ svn co http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/svn/redcloth/branches/superredcloth superredcloth
$ cd superredcloth
$ rake
$ rake gem
$ gem install pkg/superredcloth-1.###.gem

Rails assumes that you are using RedCloth when you run the textilize command. So you need to load this code into helpers/application_helper.rb:

  def textilize(text)
    require_library_or_gem "superredcloth" unless Object.const_defined?(:SuperRedCloth)
    if text.blank?
      "" 
    else
      textilized = SuperRedCloth.new(text)
      textilized.to_html
    end
  end

It works.