a bird shines his beak:

RedCloth 2.0.4.  Available in RAA.  Shortly, from RubyGems: gem 
--remote-install RedCloth
(or it might be) gem --remote --install RedCloth
(in the meantime) 
http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/493/redcloth-2.0.4.tar.gz

RedCloth [1] is a module for using Textile [2] in Ruby.  Textile is a 
text format.  A very simple text format.  Another stab at making 
readable text that can be converted to HTML.

This release is a bit more stress-tested than the previous. Very minor 
updates to the handling of inlines, so they don't step on stuff that's 
meant to be entities. Also, footnotes are scaled back a bit.

I know there's been requests for more docs and a nice cookbook sorta 
thing.  Gonna work on that, so what exactly would help best?

_why

[1] http://whytheluckystiff.net/ruby/redcloth/
[2] http://textism.com/tools/textile/