<!--#format StructuredText--> *Item 1 *Item 2 <!--#/format-->

or if I want to plain text (and not have DTML processed) I could do the following

<!--#format PlainText-->

<!--#var "This line won't be rendered"-->

<!--#/format-->

Good idea or not?

Decent idea. I would suggest the tag be named "block" and have format be one of the parameters.

My rationale is as follows. 1. I want to be able to add documents in various formats. The format is fixed at creation time. I don't want to have to tell zope how to render something everytime it is to be rendered. A structured text document is a structured text document. An alternative way of doing this is to have another property of a document specifying how it is to rendered.

We've built some ZClasses that do this. I think some of them are part of the PTK (Portal ToolKit). In essence, they have a "Contents" view (tab) with a big text area for content, and an property for format with the options of "Plain Text", "Structured Text", and "HTML". Then there's a "Format" view which is actually a document template that looks like the following: <!--#var standard_html_header--> <!--#if expr="format=='Structured Text'"--> <!--#var content fmt=structured-text--> <!--#elif expr="format=='Plain Text'"--> <PRE><!--#var content--></PRE> <!--#else--> <!--#var content--> <!--#/if--> <!--#var standard_html_footer-->

2. How do I display DTML syntax in a DTML document?

It's been a while since I've done this. I think it's generally been done by uploading a DTML source file as a File object and referencing it (using html_quote on the #var tag). There may be a newer way around this. .jPS