TextFormattingRules

See also:

• Wiki - Help on what a wiki is.
• bMD Wiki - Information on how this wiki differs from others.
• Style Guide - Information on this wiki’s preferences.
• Sandbox - A space to play around with editing.
• http://www.oddmuse.org/cgi-bin/wiki/Text_Formatting_Rules - text formatting rules (syntax) explained on the website of the OddMuse software

below yet to be fully updated for OddMuse

Wiki Text Formatting Rules

Simple editing is one of the major benefits of using a wiki. Users can edit pages without knowing HTML, and still use many formatting features of HTML. Most wikis define a set of formatting rules to convert plain text into HTML.

The following text is an overview of the this wiki’s text formatting rules. To try these rules for yourself, please feel free to edit the Sandbox page. To see how any page is formatted, just follow the link “Edit text of this page” at the bottom of the page.

Links

Links are created using square bracket pairs enclosing the wiki page’s name: [[like this]].

You can have Wiki links display one set of text and go someplace else: [[like this|somewhere else]] | [[like this|somewhere else]]

Remember, even if you see a link going somewhere like "wiki.pl?Two_Words", you can enter [[Two Words]] with a space, and not an underline.

One cool feature of this wiki engine is page redirection. Just type #REDIRECT new-page-name as the first line, and that page will redirect it’s visitors to your chosen destination. This is handy for creating alias pages, like G8-Britain and G8Britain.

If you want to link to an external site, you can type the URL directly, and it will appear both as that text and as an HTML link: http://www.ourmayday.org/2002.htm

You can also enclose it in single square brackets, in the syntax [URL description] so that [http://www.ourmayday.org/2002.htm Mayday 2002] becomes: Mayday 2002

If you omit the description, the link is turned into an automatically increased index number: [1] | [2]

This is useful for documents where links are cited as sources.

Basic Text Formatting:

Entering text on a wiki can be done quite easily. Here are the guidelines:

• Carriage returns (ie pressing the Enter key) are significant in formatting a wiki page
• Tabs are ignored
• Multiple spaces between words are ignored (just one space gets displayed)
• Use tags <b>bold</b> and <i>italic</i>
• Use tag <tt>for monospace text</tt>
• The first character entered on a line often controls the formatting of the text on that line, in brief (see below and sub pages for details):
  • ” “ space causes text to appear in a monospaced font where spaces are significant
  • ”:” colon causes text to be indented
  • ”=” equals - followed by a space - creates a heading, a trailing ”=” - preceeded by a space - is required: === Title ===
  • ”*” asterisk creates a bulleted list
  • ”#” hash creates a numbered list
  • ”;” semicolon creates a definition list, a ”:” colon is required subsequently on the same line
  • ”----” four hyphens creates a horizontal line
  • ”|” vertical bar creates a table (requires a table patch, eg WikiPatches/TableSyntaxCommonMarkup?) (not currently supported)

Repetition of the first character on the line generally increases the indentation or emphasis

• Leave a single blank line between paragraphs.
• Suppress wiki formatting and linking through escaped WikiWiki text – <nowiki>WikiWiki</nowiki>
• Insert an image using a full URL, eg http://usemod.com/wiki.gif

Lists:

Simple lists:

* Text for a bulleted list item.
** Text for second-level list.
*** Text for third level, etc.

…which looks like:

• Text for a bulleted list item.
  • Text for second-level list.
    • Text for third level, etc.

Numbered lists:

# Text for a numbered list item.
## Text for second-level list.
### Text for third level, etc.
## Another Text for the second level.

…which looks like:

1. Text for a numbered list item.
   1. Text for second-level list.
      1. Text for third level, etc.
   2. Another Text for the second level.

Definition Text:

Term with indented definition: [without a blank line between term and definition]

;Term:Definition (indented)
;;Term (indented):Definition (indented two levels)
;;;Term (indented twice):Definition (indented to third level)

…which looks like: ;Term:Definition (indented) ;;Term (indented):Definition (indented two levels) ;;;Term (indented twice):Definition (indented to third level)

Images

Just provide the URL, and the image will be inserted inline.

These extensions are recognized: gif, jpg, png, bmp, jpeg

If you have a choice, results are usually best with PNG for computer generated images, and JPEG for photographic images.

Preformatted Text

Individual lines can be displayed as preformatted (fixed-width or “typewriter”-font) text by placing one or more spaces at the start of the line. Other wiki formatting (like links) will be applied to this kind of preformatted text.

Additionally, multi-line sections can be marked as pre-formatted text using lines starting with <pre> (to start pre-formatted text), and </pre> (to end preformatted text). The <pre> and </pre> tags are not displayed. Wiki links and other formatting is not done within a preformatted section. (If you want wiki formatting, use spaces at the start of the line instead of the <pre> and </pre> tags.)

For instance:

Pre-formatted section here.  No other link
  or format processing
is done on pre-formatted sections.
For instance, OddMuseWiki is not a link here.

and: This is the starting-spaces version of preformatted text. Note that links like UseModWiki still work.

Miscellaneous rules:

• To quote text without applying the wiki formatting rules, enclose it within a <nowiki> … </nowiki> section. Within a nowiki section, only HTML-quoting of special characters (<>&) will occur--no other formatting rules will be applied.
• A line which ends in a backslash character (\) will be joined with the next line before most formatting rules are applied. This can be useful for breaking up long sections of text in line-sensitive sections (like lists or indented text).
• If raw-HTML sections are enabled (they are disabled by default), you can enter raw HTML code within a <html> … </html> section. Note that no quoting is done, so you will need to use sequences like &lt; if you want to display a < character.
• Most of the formatting rules are order-independent. On rare occasions the order of processing may be important. The rules are processed in the following order: raw HTML sections, HTML quoting, nowiki tags, backslash line joining, preformatted sections, paragraphs, lists and indented text, horizontal lines, italic/bold text, URLs, and finally ordinary WikiName links. [No longer fully accurate, needs updating.]

HTML

• There is no need to encode HTML characters like “<” less than, “>” greater than, or “&” ampersand.
• HTML-encoded characters like < will not be translated.
• HTML characters like © and ∞ can be used on pages: do “&copy;" and "&infin;” (version 0.91 and later). See http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/sgml/entities.html.

Text formatting rules originally copied from Infoanarchy: http://web.archive.org/*/http://www.infoanarchy.org/wiki/wiki.pl?Text_Formatting_Rules

but they have changed wiki recently.