About TEXTILE Files
Textile Markup
Textile is a lightweight markup language that generates HTML from a human-readable syntax. It was popularized by the Textpattern CMS and the Redmine project management tool, offering a cleaner writing experience than raw HTML.
Family
Documents & Text
Extension
.textile
MIME Type
text/x-textile
Can Use As
HOW TEXTILE
CAME TO BE.
Textile was created in 2002 by Dean Allen as the markup language for Textpattern, a pioneering PHP content management system. Textile’s syntax aimed to be more expressive than HTML without the cryptic overhead: `*bold*`, `_italic_`, `_*both*_`, bracketed notation for links and images, and shortcuts for tables and footnotes. In an era when most blog authors typed raw HTML, Textile felt like liberation.
Textile found its biggest home in Ruby on Rails and the Redmine project-management tool. For years, every Rails generator defaulted to Textile for README examples. Redmine tickets, wikis, and documentation all use Textile syntax. When Markdown rose in the mid-2000s with John Gruber’s simpler conventions, Textile’s market share slowly eroded — but the format is still maintained, still Rails-compatible, and still the default in Redmine instances around the world.
CURIOSITIES &
TRIVIA.
Textile powered Textpattern (2003) — one of the first three major PHP CMSes alongside WordPress and MovableType.
Ruby on Rails shipped with a Textile helper for years before switching defaults to HTML and Markdown.
Redmine, a popular Rails-based project-management tool, uses Textile for every ticket, wiki page, and comment — millions of enterprise users.
Textile's bracket-notation for links (`"text":url`) is distinct from Markdown's `[text](url)` — a clean aesthetic choice of its era.
Dean Allen later founded Readymade Magazine and worked on typographic tools before his death in 2018.
STRENGTHS &
LIMITATIONS.
Strengths
- More expressive than Markdown in classical usage (tables, footnotes, classes).
- Mature implementation in RedCloth (Ruby), php-textile, js-textile.
- Core format of Redmine — millions of daily users.
- Clean human-readable syntax.
Limitations
- Market share decimated by Markdown since the mid-2000s.
- Not as widely supported outside the Ruby/Rails ecosystem.
- No CommonMark-style spec — implementations differ on edge cases.
- Rarely added to new projects in 2026.
Typical Sizes & Weights
Blog post
3-30 KB
Redmine wiki page
5-50 KB
Technical Specifications
- MIME type
- text/x-textile
- Extensions
- .textile
- Implementations
- RedCloth (Ruby), php-textile, js-textile
- Primary users
- Redmine, Textpattern, early Rails
- Encoding
- UTF-8
CONVERT FROM
TEXTILE
Common Use Cases
Redmine wikis, Textpattern CMS, lightweight web content authoring
Related Formats
Popular comparisons
TEXTILE vs PDF
Differences, file size, and when to choose each format.
TEXTILE vs DOCX
Differences, file size, and when to choose each format.
TEXTILE vs ODT
Differences, file size, and when to choose each format.
TEXTILE vs TXT
Differences, file size, and when to choose each format.
TEXTILE vs MD
Differences, file size, and when to choose each format.
TEXTILE vs HTML
Differences, file size, and when to choose each format.
Popular TEXTILE conversions
The most-requested destinations when starting from TEXTILE.
Frequently Asked Questions about TEXTILE
Frequently Asked Questions
TEXTILE (Textile Markup) is a document format used to store paginated text, with optional formatting, tables, images, hyperlinks, headers and footers. It sits in the documents & text family and is typically associated with a specific office suite or publishing pipeline that defined the format and ships the canonical reader.
Modern office suites — Microsoft Word, Google Docs, LibreOffice Writer, Apple Pages — open most TEXTILE files with reasonable fidelity. If your installed software does not support TEXTILE, convert to DOCX or PDF first using KaijuConverter; both open in virtually every reader, including free online viewers.
Upload the TEXTILE to KaijuConverter and pick DOCX, PDF, ODT, RTF, HTML, Markdown, or plain text. Our pipeline runs LibreOffice headlessly plus pandoc for text formats — the same engines behind professional document pipelines. Styles, tables, images, and hyperlinks survive the conversion intact.
Yes, to a high degree. Standard fonts, headings, lists, tables, images, hyperlinks and page structure transfer cleanly. Custom fonts substitute to the closest match if not embedded; obscure layout features unique to TEXTILE (frames, legacy macros) may flatten to static content in the target format.