I guess the reason I never thought to write this is when I put a .txt file
in ikiwiki, I'm happy enough to see it copied through unchanged.

I guess the advantage of using this plugin is that you get the page wrapper
around the preformatted text, and could even inline such a page.

There is not currently a good way to turn off some processing steps for
some page types. It's either all or nothing. The patch in
[[todo/format_escape]] might allow a formatter to register its own special
version of htmllink that didn't do anything, but would that be enough?

--[[Joey]]

[Here](http://www.gmcmanus.org/plaintext.pm) is an alternate approach.
It encodes entities using a filter hook, before wikilinks are linkified.
So wikilinks turn up as links.
It also uses URI::Find to turn URIs into links.

I'm not very familiar with Perl, so this code could be improved.

--Gabriel