Paste your Textile markup below
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Paste input and click Convert// convert textile markup formats in one click
Convert Textile markup to HTML and HTML back to Textile instantly. Browser-based, free, no sign-up required. Supports all standard Textile syntax.
Ready to convert
Paste input and click ConvertSelect Textile → HTML or HTML → Textile using the toggle buttons at the top of the tool.
Paste your Textile markup or HTML source into the left input area.
Click Convert to get your output, then use Copy All or Preview (HTML output) to use the result.
Textile is a lightweight markup language originally created by Dean Allen in 2002. It was widely used in early blogging platforms like Textpattern, and remains popular in Ruby on Rails apps and legacy content systems. Textile uses simple punctuation to denote formatting — asterisks for bold, underscores for italic, h1. for headings.
This converter supports headings (h1.–h6.), paragraphs, *bold*, _italic_, -strikethrough-, +insert+, @inline code@, ^superscript^, ~subscript~, "links":url, !images!, unordered lists (* item), ordered lists (# item), blockquotes (bq.), and horizontal rules (---). Extended Textile features like tables and footnotes are not yet supported.
Conversion is processed server-side via a lightweight PHP API, but no data is stored, logged, or retained. Your content is used only to compute the result and is never saved or shared.
Yes. Use the "HTML → Textile" mode toggle at the top. The converter handles common HTML elements like headings, paragraphs, bold, italic, links, images, and lists, and converts them back to the equivalent Textile syntax.
The converter accepts up to 200 KB of input text. For most documents this is more than sufficient. If you need to convert larger files, consider splitting the content into sections.
Textile predates Markdown and has a slightly different syntax. It remains common in legacy Ruby on Rails apps, Textpattern CMS, and older blogging platforms. If you maintain older content systems, Textile may already be your format of choice.
Basic table support is planned for a future version. Currently, table syntax is passed through as-is. For now, if you need table conversion, you may need to manually adjust the output after converting the rest of your content.
A Textile Converter is a tool that transforms content written in Textile markup language into HTML, and conversely, converts HTML code back into Textile format. Textile is one of the earliest lightweight markup languages, predating Markdown by a couple of years. It was designed to allow writers to create well-structured HTML documents using simple, readable text formatting.
Our browser-based Textile Converter makes it trivially easy to switch between these two formats. Whether you're migrating a legacy blog, cleaning up CMS content, or just exploring Textile for the first time, this tool handles the conversion instantly without requiring any software installation.
Textile was created by Dean Allen and first published in 2002, making it one of the earliest lightweight markup languages. Allen introduced it as part of Textpattern, one of the first modern content management systems. The syntax was designed to be human-readable in plain text form while producing clean, semantic HTML when parsed.
Textile gained widespread adoption in the Ruby on Rails community, largely because RedCloth — a popular Ruby implementation of the Textile spec — was included in many early Rails tutorials and scaffolding tools. This made Textile the de facto markup language for many early Rails-based web applications and blogs.
Today, while Markdown has become the more universally dominant markup language for developer documentation, READMEs, and static site generators, Textile remains actively used in Textpattern CMS, Redmine project management software, and countless legacy content systems that were built during the mid-2000s to mid-2010s era.
Understanding the basic Textile syntax makes working with this converter much easier. Here's a quick overview of the most common Textile formatting rules:
h1. through h6. followed by a space and the heading text. For example, h2. My Heading becomes <h2>My Heading</h2>.*bold* becomes <strong>bold</strong>._italic_ becomes <em>italic</em>.@code@ becomes <code>code</code>."Link Text":http://url.com to produce a clickable anchor tag.!image-url.jpg! to embed an image in the output HTML.* to create list items inside an unordered list.# to create numbered list items.bq. to wrap the paragraph in a blockquote element.---) on a line of their own produce an <hr> tag.-strikethrough- becomes <del>strikethrough</del>.^superscript^ becomes <sup>superscript</sup>.~subscript~ becomes <sub>subscript</sub>.When you convert Textile to HTML, the converter reads your Textile source line by line. Block-level elements such as headings, list items, and blockquotes are identified by their leading markup tokens (e.g., h1., *, bq.). These are converted to the appropriate HTML wrapper elements. Inline formatting is then processed within each block using regular expression substitution to replace Textile inline markers with their HTML equivalents.
Empty lines between blocks signal paragraph boundaries, which is consistent with how Textile parsers typically work. Consecutive list items at the same level are collected into a single <ul> or <ol> element. The converter also handles nested inline formatting correctly, so you can have bold text that also contains a link, for example.
Converting HTML back to Textile is slightly more complex because HTML is a tree structure and Textile is a line-oriented format. The converter first processes block-level elements — headings, lists, blockquotes, paragraphs — using pattern matching to extract content and prefix it with the appropriate Textile token. Inline HTML tags are then replaced with their Textile equivalents using regular expressions. Finally, remaining HTML tags are stripped, entities are decoded, and excess whitespace is normalised to produce clean, readable Textile output.
This reverse conversion is particularly useful when you have HTML content that you want to store in a system that uses Textile — for instance, importing blog posts from a WordPress export (which generates HTML) into a Textpattern installation (which uses Textile).
If you're starting a new project today and have a free choice of markup language, Markdown is the more widely supported option. It's the standard for GitHub READMEs, documentation platforms like Read the Docs, static site generators like Jekyll and Hugo, and most modern writing tools. The Markdown ecosystem is larger and more actively developed.
However, if you're working with an existing system that uses Textile — Textpattern, Redmine, older Ruby on Rails apps — then Textile is the right choice for that context. The syntax is quite similar to Markdown for basic use cases, so the learning curve is minimal if you already know one of these languages.
One advantage Textile has over standard Markdown is that it was always designed as a single spec rather than spawning multiple incompatible dialects. While Markdown exists in many flavors (CommonMark, GFM, MultiMarkdown, etc.), Textile has been more consistent over time, making interoperability between Textile-supporting tools generally more predictable.
There are several scenarios where a Textile converter is particularly valuable. Content migration is one of the most common — when a team decides to move from a Textile-based CMS to a Markdown-based static site generator, every piece of content needs to be converted. Doing this by hand would be error-prone and extremely time-consuming; a converter handles it accurately in seconds.
Another common use case is debugging. When you're not sure why a Textile snippet isn't rendering correctly, converting it to HTML lets you see exactly what the parser is producing, making it much easier to spot errors in the markup. The live preview feature in this converter is especially helpful for this workflow.
Developers building tools that consume or produce Textile content also use converters during testing, to validate that their parser or serializer is producing correct output. And writers who need to produce clean HTML from structured text — for email templates, CMS imports, or document generation — find Textile to HTML conversion much faster than writing HTML by hand.