How to use Textile to make your listings look better

At Karmur, we use a system called Textile which you can use to make your listings look more interesting without having to learn any web design type stuff.

You can actually do quite a lot with it but even if you learn just the basics this will be enough for you to make your listings much nicer looking and more importantly add more structure, that way if you’ve got lots to say it won’t appear like one long daunting blob of text.

You can use the stuff covered in the next few posts pretty much anywhere on the site where you have to enter more than a single line of text.

To put things in bold, just enter it with asterisks immediately before and after the word. So if you enter:

*hello*

It will appear like so:

hello

To put things in italics, just enter it with underscores immediately before and after the word. So if you enter:

_hello_

It will appear like so:

hello

To add links to other places on the web, first enter the anchor text (which is the text that the user sees) in quotes, immediately followed by a colon, then the link. So if you enter:

"This is a link to Google":http://www.google.com

It will appear like this:

This is a link to Google

Want to add a list of items? No problem.

For basic bullet points, simply enter one entry per line, prefixed by an asterisk and a space, so if you enter:

* Milk
* Eggs
* Chunky bacon

You’ll get:

• Milk
• Eggs
• Chunky bacon

But wait, there’s more! Simply use multiple asterisks to nest your pointers:

* Dairy Products
** Milk
** Eggs
* Yuck veggies...
** Broccoli
** Carrots
* The good stuff
** Yay, chunky bacon

And you’ll get:

• Dairy Products
  • Milk
  • Eggs
• Yuck veggies…
  • Broccoli
  • Carrots
• The good stuff
  • Yay, chunky bacon

Or we can go one better and do numbered lists. Simply do the same, but with hashes:

# Milk
# Eggs
# Chunky Bacon

And you’ll get:

1. Milk
2. Eggs
3. Chunky Bacon

And, to be honest, I don’t know if you can do it with numbered lists but I expect you can, so if we give this a try:

# Dairy Products
# Milk
## Eggs
# Yuck veggies...
## Broccoli
## Carrots
# The good stuff
## Yay, chunky bacon

1. Dairy Products
2. Milk
   1. Eggs
3. Yuck veggies…
   1. Broccoli
   2. Carrots
4. The good stuff
   1. Yay, chunky bacon

And yes, it works…..

So that should be enough to get you going, though you can learn more from the Textile website.

In addition, if you know basic html, you can use the usual non intrusive tags like strong, em, ul/li, etc.