My non-programmer associates and I really, really liked having easy access to the formatting guide on the message pages.

As designers we care about how things look. So if you don’t spend your day writing code or thinking like a coder, it’s really nice to easily understand how to emphasize something, number a list, make bullets, etc. And one client had a few words show up in strikethrough type because they used a hyphen as a bullet (pretty common practice).

Anybody else miss this feature?

+1..

Until they do keep this link handy Textile Quick Reference.

Cheers.

:)

I have missed it for awhile. I usually end up on Google either typing “Textile” or on Google trying to figure out what basecamp or 37signals uses to format their text (I can never distinguish between markdown and textile and some of the others). The format guide should have been more encompassing anyway. And now that it is almost completely gone (I’ve seen it somewhere, like maybe when you edit a message or comment)—I’m like, what the heck do I do to make this text bold?

And who knew you coud

• nest
• your
  • list items
• ?

I can recommend Basecode which gets around the problem.

Firefox and basecode will solve that problem for you.

Basecode is great, but clients don’t always have this installed.

I, too, wish the formatting guide was more readily available.

This is kind of annoying, but…the formatting guide is still in the whiteboards section. What I did was take a screenshot of the formating guide and posted it in a private message so that i had quick access to from within the messages section.

hacked solution, but works until they put it back.

Hope it helps.

What I don’t understand is why break something that worked well? What was the thought process on removing this? Anyone from 37s wanna comment?

37s commented some time ago that they’d like to phase out a lot of the Textile stuff in general in their products, which I suspect this is part of.

Slapshotw, that’s interesting, I’m going to have a hunt for that thread. I hope that doesn’t happen, ‘cos I’m a big fan of Textile and have just posted a possible extension to it. ALthough I guess 37’s track record is that there’s a good chance they’ll replace it with something even better?

In the meantime, on the issue of a Textile formatting reference, I always use the project Settings to put a brief intro on the project Overview page that includes the following paragraph:

This project web site uses Textile to enable the formatting of text on the site. It’s a great tool – if you want to format the text you add (bold, italic, quotes, bullet points, etc), click here for a formatting reference.

@Slapshotw

37s commented some time ago that they’d like to phase out a lot of the Textile stuff in general in their products

I’ve Googled around for some reference to what you say, but can’t find anything. I’m curious, where have you seen this?

It was in the highrise forum. Here’s the relevant quote from Jason:

We’d love to run away from textile formatting which is why we didn’t include it in Highrise (or Campfire—the last product we released before Highrise). Textile formatting has been a big mess overall.

From here: http://forum.37signals.com/highrise/forums/9/topics/802

David also makes some comments in the thread about it being something they wish they weren’t supporting.

Of course, this is a different situation. In Highrise, if you put asterisks around a word, it doesn’t get formatted and there’s no confusion. In Basecamp, it does still get formatted; so while the guide is gone, the functionality is still there. And I think therein lies the problem and disconnect.

Well it would seem that we need sometype of system to allow us to write up messages to include bullets, bold etc without a lot of code. I know our clients don’t know Textile and most don’t use Firefox so we need something that is built in natively.

SccrWooHoo

know our clients don’t know Textile and most don’t use Firefox so we need something that is built in natively.

+1 to that.

So, what is the replacement for Textile then?

While I appreciate that the formatting is still recognized by Basecamp, it doesn’t help if no one (read: clients) knows about it. In a sense, it feels like a feature removal. Formatting is key to the organization of information in Basecamp. Without it, we have a series of plain text fields.

I would love a response on this, please.

For myself, while it took me a little bit to figure out all of the formatting, I’ve grown to enjoy it’s simplicity & the fact that it’s supported in many different systems makes it easy to not have to remember several scripting languages. It’s available in my hosted wiki, along with several other places on the net.

I agree with Andrew. Without it, I think it would very much negatively impact the information that I can post into Basecamp.

/2¢

Would be good if we could get an official word here…

@slapshotw:

It was in the highrise forum.

Thanks for that – very interesting. I can see 37’s point about the support issue, though I find Textile indispensable. Like many, my clients don’t tend to use it in their responses on my projects, but I know they value the fact that I use it to make the content of my posts more ‘accessible’ to them – in the sense of readability and easily seeing what’s important and what’s less so. I find that I have need to use pretty much all of Textile’s capability at one time or another.

37’s ethos of keeping things “simple” for their users (and for them!) is clearly crucial to their success, but on the other hand I think the ethos of Textile is entirely in keeping with the growing momentum around semantic mark-up on the web. I await with interest to see where this will all end up.

FYI someone else started a thread on this topic here.

We use Textile on our WordPress and Expression Engine sites, both of which support Textile. Basecamp is a great training ground for clients learning to use the HTML shortcuts for editing their own sites. I find it removes one of the biggest barriers to clients interacting with their sites – not having to look at code in the text fields!