Generate different kinds of output

Could textile be split into a generic textile parser and a set of output formatters? The default formatter would be HTML but others could target other languages (HTML5/pdf etc.)

Definitely, yes. RedCloth, for example, already has a textile2latex converter that works remarkably well (but does not support Textile 2.2). Currently, I am generating a PDFs from my textpattern pages from the HTML, but pdflatex would be much preferred :))