# The 'text' language identifer appears as applescript rather than text
**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/the-text-language-identifer-appears-as-applescript-rather-than-text/14076
**Category:** Feature
**Created:** [3월 25, 2014, 2:30오전 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/the-text-language-identifer-appears-as-applescript-rather-than-text/14076 "2014-03-25T02:30:57Z")
**Posts on this page:** 10
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@thristhart](https://meta.discourse.org/u/thristhart)
#### Post date: [3월 25, 2014, 2:30오전 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/the-text-language-identifer-appears-as-applescript-rather-than-text/14076/1 "2014-03-25T02:30:57Z")
````
```text
Here's some text in the code fence with the text language identifier
```
```applescript
Here's some text in the code fence with the applescript identifier
```
````
```plaintext
Here's some text in the code fence with the text language identifier
```
```applescript
Here's some text in the code fence with the applescript identifier
```
A screenshot just in case this is a client issue You can see that the blocks are identically highlighted, despite being different language identifiers. Inspecting the block shows that it is incorrectly assigned the class "text applescript" rather than the "text" it should be. This also happens when specifically set to lang-auto.
I have been attempting to figure out where the error happens but I’m not getting anywhere as of yet.
---
### Author:  [@zchrykng](https://meta.discourse.org/u/zchrykng)
#### Post date: [3월 25, 2014, 1:51오후 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/the-text-language-identifer-appears-as-applescript-rather-than-text/14076/2 "2014-03-25T13:51:08Z")
shouldn’t you just omit `text` since it would default to that?
---
### Author:  [@thristhart](https://meta.discourse.org/u/thristhart)
#### Post date: [3월 25, 2014, 6:27오후 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/the-text-language-identifer-appears-as-applescript-rather-than-text/14076/3 "2014-03-25T18:27:19Z")
Unfortunately it happens when text is omitted as well:
```plaintext
here's some text in the code fence with no language identifier
```
---
### Author:  [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)
#### Post date: [3월 25, 2014, 6:28오후 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/the-text-language-identifer-appears-as-applescript-rather-than-text/14076/4 "2014-03-25T18:28:52Z")
Why don’t you just indent by 4 spaces?
The strong assumption of fences is that **THEY ARE FOR SOURCE CODE**. (That said, if you explicitly say “none” I agree that should work, but I question why one would bother putting not-source-code in a source code block?)
If you just want pre-formatted text, indent 4 spaces:
```
here's some text in the code fence with no language identifier
```
---
### Author:  [@thristhart](https://meta.discourse.org/u/thristhart)
#### Post date: [3월 25, 2014, 6:38오후 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/the-text-language-identifer-appears-as-applescript-rather-than-text/14076/5 "2014-03-25T18:38:08Z")
I initially discovered the issue when I was attempting to pre-format a large block of text that I needed to be indented four spaces _inside_ the code block; that is, effectively indented eight spaces. There was no easy way to do that in-editor (other than copy/pasting eight spaces repeatedly) so I tried to use code fences instead.
```
the only way to do this is eight spaces
```
```plaintext
or via code fence and four spaces
```
Four spaces is advantageous over eight because I can use the in-editor Preformatted text button to indent large blocks of text by four spaces, but there’s no way to do that with eight. This is obviously not a common use-case, so it’s not a particularly high priority bug.
---
### Author:  [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)
#### Post date: [3월 26, 2014, 1:41오전 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/the-text-language-identifer-appears-as-applescript-rather-than-text/14076/6 "2014-03-26T01:41:04Z")
Any editor worth a damn can indent and unindent blocks of text at will, to arbitrary spacing depths.
---
### Author:  [@thristhart](https://meta.discourse.org/u/thristhart)
#### Post date: [3월 26, 2014, 3:51오전 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/the-text-language-identifer-appears-as-applescript-rather-than-text/14076/7 "2014-03-26T03:51:25Z")
The discourse editor can’t 😛
---
### Author:  [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)
#### Post date: [3월 26, 2014, 4:22오전 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/the-text-language-identifer-appears-as-applescript-rather-than-text/14076/8 "2014-03-26T04:22:24Z")
Are you coding in the Discourse editor?
---
### Author:  [@thristhart](https://meta.discourse.org/u/thristhart)
#### Post date: [3월 26, 2014, 7:32오전 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/the-text-language-identifer-appears-as-applescript-rather-than-text/14076/9 "2014-03-26T07:32:42Z")
No, I was attempting to abuse the code fences to do prettier formatting for a set of Nomic rules. While I don’t mind using vim to do the indentation, I’m more concerned with making it easier for my users to do the pretty formatting, or they won’t bother.
My poor reasons for using the text language specification are irrelevant, though. Text should definitely not render as applescript, which I’m sure you agree with. Still familiarizing myself with the way discourse does highlighting so I can fix it myself, since I’m probably the first person to be bothered by it.
---
### Author:  [@chapoi](https://meta.discourse.org/u/chapoi)
#### Post date: [12월 4, 2025, 11:09오전 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/the-text-language-identifer-appears-as-applescript-rather-than-text/14076/10 "2025-12-04T11:09:30Z")