Is, to put it simply, *driving me nuts*

h3. Lovely Code Highlighting

Geshi was annoying me. Not driven by stylesheets, it uses some pretty bloated markup which makes it very hard for you to do much about changing how the code looks. That markup is being pushed from my server, increasing my bandwidth use and increasing page load time.

“dp.SyntaxHighlighter”:http://www.dreamprojections.com/SyntaxHighlighter/ is a Javascript library which performs syntax highlighting on the client side. It supports all the languages I’m likely to post code snippets in, and best of all it’s driven by CSS. To use it, I need to put my code sample in a textarea, like so:

   
   ... some code here ...

h3. Evil Textile

Textile is great – and evil. On the one hand, it makes writing post pretty easy – I can use Textile shorthand to quickly churn my useless drivel out. Textile performs its substitution on the server side – and it seems was clobbering my textarea blocks. To be fair it was trying to be helpful – it was escaping ‘<' characters as '<' and the like.

There are two ways which _should_ enable you to escape Textile – that is to turn off Textile formatting for a given block. Both wrapping your block in '==' or with 'notextile' tags should stop the formatting. This didn't seem to work for me. A search on the web (I'm avoiding using the verb 'Google' in case I get sued) showed that even in Textile friendly Textpattern it’s “far from simple”:http://forum.textdrive.com/viewtopic.php?pid=78277, however it should still work.

I followed all the instructions given – and indeed I can use ” to stop formatting of things like ‘(C)’ which normally turns in to a ‘(C)’ – to no avail.

If anyone out there can work out how to stop Textile formatting angle brackets (or can think of some other way for me to render a textarea with a specified name without Textile interfering) then I’m all ears.