tomd

Automated conversion from .textile to .md with pandoc

Users with many textile files in their Jekyll Pages site should consider using pandoc, a utility for converting between different markup formats. E.g. To convert foo.textile to foo.md

pandoc --wrap=preserve -f textile -t markdown_github <foo.textile >foo.md

Limitations

Unfortunately pandoc may change content in unwanted ways when it encounters:

• YAML frontmatter at the top of .textile files
• {% highlight %} blocks
• <notextile> blocks

To get around these limitations, this tomd shell script calls awk and sed to filter out those sections and then re-insert them after pandoc has converted the rest the file.

To run tomd

1. Install pandoc from https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/releases
2. Copy the tomd script and 2 awk files into your Jekyll project and run the script from there.

git clone https://github.com/jldec/tomd.git
cp tomd/tomd tomd/*.awk your-jekyll-project-folder
cd your-jekyll-project-folder
./tomd

The script will look for .textile files in the _posts directory, convert them to .md, and leave backups of the original textile files in a new directory called _old_posts. You can override the names of the 2 directories with 2 arguments to the script.

If everything works, you should see output like:

$ ./tomd
checking for sed, awk, and pandoc
/usr/bin/sed
awk version 20070501
pandoc 1.16.0.2
looking for .textile files in _posts moving them to _old_posts
nnn textile files converted

Running under Windows

The latest version of pandoc for Windows can be downloaded from https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/releases/.

In addition to pandoc, tomd requires a unix-y shell and utilities. The easiest way to get those for Windows is by installing the default set of cygwin utilities.

Before running tomd, use cygwin dos2unix and run it against the tomd file to remove extra linefeeds.

The output of running tomd in the cygwin shell should look very similar to the OSX output above.

NOTE

tomd has run successfully under OSX and Windows against a couple of repos, but it was not extensively tested, so use at your own risk. Also, please make backups of your content!