Appendix 8: Formatters Reference

When a page gets rendered, it goes through a formatter, i.e. something that can translate whatever syntax you used into the syntax you want the output to be. In 99% of cases, the syntax will be something like Markdown or Textile, and the output will be HTML.

Here is a list of the formatters that come with PieCrust out of the box.

Markdown

Name: markdown

Markdown is a lightweight markup language that makes it easy to write HTML. For a primer on its syntax, see the original documentation.

The default Markdown formatter in PieCrust is powered by Python-Markdown, which works well and has a good number of available extensions. You can enable those Markdown extensions in your website configuration like this:

markdown:
  extensions: name,name,name

The available extension names for Python-Markdown can be found here. The name to use is the last piece in the list, so for example the “Fenced Code Blocks” extension would be enabled with fenced_code.

For a vast performance improvement, you can install the PieCrust-Hoedown plugin which uses a native (i.e. written in C) implementation of Markdown. It may not be available for your system however, which is why it doesn’t ship by default with PieCrust.

Textile

Name: textile

Textile is another lightweight markup language to write HTML. It has more features than Markdown (see above) but is also more complicated. You can refer to this documentation to learn the syntax.