Editing Tips

Editing tips

This page gives most of the details on the formatting commands used in the text to HTML conversion. We've tried to be as succinct as possible to make it easier to find things. Suggestions welcome, and feel free to try editing the Sand Box.

To start

Don't indent paragraphs, and don't use tabs.
A blank line creates a new paragraph.
Four or more dashes gives a horizontal line.

Fonts and appearance

Hashes around text makes it red
Putting asterisks makes text bold
Slashes gives italics
Underscores gives underlining
For a multi-word effect replace the spaces between words with the symbol or enclose each word separately.
Preformatted text can be included by having a line with just {{{ on it, then your text, then a line with just }}} on it.

Examples of all these are easiest found by clicking on the Edit this page link at the bottom of this page.

Lists

Indent with an asterisk to get a list.
Indenting all lines to the same level keeps the text in a single item even if it's spread over several input lines.
1. Using a digit gives an ordered list
2. Sub-lists work.
3. Blank lines create new paragraphs.
  Everything works inside lists, provided you indent all the text to the same level.
4. Use the same digit for each item - the HTML sorts it out.

Headings

Putting 1, 2 or 3 "!"s at the start of a line makes it into a heading, and puts it into the table of contents at the end of the page. Three "!"s gives the biggest heading.

Tables

You can create tables by putting vertical bars to start, end, and between items.

This	is	in
an	example	table

Don't have leading or trailing spaces. As with all these examples, click on the Edit This Page link at the bottom to see the original source for this example.

An alternative is to make columns. You introduce columns with "********>" on a single line, then "********" between columns, and finally "********<" to close them.

Columns are not centred, and there is no alignment attempted between them. They do not have borders. The page with the Go Article uses columns.

You can use three square brackets and either "<" or ">" to include a floating table. See Game Of Go and Synchronous Site Swap for examples.
When using square brackets and "<" or ">" to create the floating table you can optionally append (without spaces) a number, giving the percentage width the table should use. The page on Synchronous Site Swap also uses "|>>" and "<<|" to centre text. These have to be fields in their own right, which is why they are not causing things to be centered here. They have quotation marks around them. They are new, and I'm not entirely convinced they're bug-free. Certainly they've been useful in the cases I've used them, but you'll want to check things carefully if you do use them, and please let us know if something seems odd.

In an emergency

You can directly insert HTML. Any line that starts with three single-quotes and a space will have those four characters removed, and the rest of the line will be copied verbatim.

Editing tips

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