Configuring HTML Tidy in Bluefish

Question

I am currently running Ubuntu 14.o4, and installed HTML Tidy on my computer. I am trying to use it within Bluefish (bluefish 2.2.9-0trusty1) but any time I run the filter, it gives me this error:

The command tidy -utf8 exited with error code 512.

The current external filter command for Tidy is: |tidy -utf8|

Answer 1

There's a conversation about this here: http://narkive.com/4QvPqDp2.2

Olivier Sessink, writing in 2012:

Post by Martin crysman Zahradník

Hello, I am just wondering why I cannot use tidy directly from BF... If I try

The command tidy -qe '%i' exited with error code 512.

fixed in svn, commands with %i and %o work again.

but the exit status message is still there, which is useless for commands like tidy that generate an exit code for faulty html when everything is working as expected.

I'm a bit in doubt how to handle this for 2.2.4:

1) remove the dialog - that means that bluefish will also not give an error message if tidy is for example not installed at all

2) keep the dialog - and bluefish will always show this error message if the html is not perfect

Is there by any chance some errors in your HTML? Do you get the error with a syntacticly perfect "Hello, World" HTML sample?

Answer 2

As a work-around to HTML tidy reporting this error message, try the alternative menu option to invoke "Tidy HTML (perltidy)", which seems more resilient to errors in the HTML. The default options are not particularly good imho, so you may have to change those (either by editing the options in the external tools configuration dialog, or the rc file directory: ~/.bluefish/rcfile-2.0); e.g., -fws to freeze whitespace and -fnl to keep newlines the same gives you simple auto-indentation without completely reformatting the whole file.