Page formatters

PieCrust ships with 2 formatters out of the box (Markdown and Textile), one “complementary” formatter (SmartyPants), and a “pass-through” formatter that doesn’t touch your text at all.

Markdown

Markdown is the default formatter. This can be changed with the default_format setting in the site configuration. If you did that, you can still use Markdown for a given page by setting its format configuration setting to markdown.

Because PieCrust uses PHP Markdown, it’s possible to use the Markdown Extra syntax, which adds a few non-standard features to the formatter. If you want to use those extra-features, create a site configuration section called markdown and set use_markdown_extra to true:

markdown:
    use_markdown_extra: true

Textile

Textile is more powerful than Markdown but that means it’s also more complicated and less natural to write. You can use this formatter by setting the page’s format to textile.

SmartyPants

SmartyPants will transform the punctuation on your pages into more typographically accurate characters. For instance, it will make your quotes prettier and let you easily insert en- and em-dashes.

SmartyPants is not enabled by default. To enable it, create a site configuration section called smartypants with an enabled setting set to true:

smartypants:
    enabled: true

When it’s enabled, it will be applied to all pages except those that are not formatted at all (using the “pass-through” formatter, mentioned below).

Because PieCrust uses PHP SmartyPants, it’s possible to use SmartyPants Typographer, which adds a few extra features to the standard SmartyPants formatting. To use it, set use_smartypants_typographer to true in the site configuration:

smartypants:
    enabled: true
    use_smartypants_typographer: true

Pass-through

If you don’t want a page’s contents to be formatted at all, set the format to none.