To see how a certain page was formatted, use Edit text of this page just to see how it was done. On this page, you can see that two equal signs on either side of text makes a "headline" and that three single quotes makes bold text. (BTW: It's OK to just use your browser's back button to leave an edit box unsaved.)
Simple editing is one of the major benefits of Wiki. You can edit pages without knowing HTML, but still use many formatting features of HTML. Some HTML "tags", like , <b>, <i>, and <pre> are allowed within a page, but there are also non-HTML ways to accomplish the same thing.
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. The "Preview" button on the editing page may also be helpful for finding formatting errors before saving.
Here are a few basic rules:
To mark text as bold or italic, you just use a bunch of single quotes before and after the text:
''Two single quotes are italics'', '''three single quotes are bold''', '''''five single quotes are bold and italic.'''''
looks like:
Two single quotes are italics, three single quotes are bold, five single quotes are bold and italic.
You can link to a page by removing the spaces between two or more words, and starting each word with a capital letter. For instance, WikiName? and TextFormattingExamples? are samples of page links.
Non-existing pages, like SampleUndefinedPage?, will be displayed with a question-mark for a link. The question mark link indicates the page doesn't exist yet -- follow the link to create and edit the page. [The sample page used here is a special example page -- you can't define it.]
Write the URL: http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?SandBox
Result: http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?SandBox
In nearly all cases trailing punctuation is ignored, so you can safely make links like http://www.usemod.com/, without the trailing comma being part of the link.
If the URL itself is long and ugly, you could use a bracketed link.
Just enclose a URL with square brackets, like this: [http://www.yahoo.com/]
Result: [1]
The URL will be replaced with a number. Note that is often considered bad style to replace the name of something (book, author, paper, web site) with the reference in square brackets.
If you can't read it out loud, don't write it. Use the active voice, instead.
Bracketed Links with Custom Text
Just follow the URL inside the square brackets with the text you want to act as the link, like this: [http://www.yahoo.com/ Yahoo Search Engine]
Result: [Yahoo Search Engine]
Write the URL to the image: http://www.usemod.com/wiki.gif
Result:
Just write the ISBN Number, like this: ISBN 0-471-25311-1
Result: ISBN 0-471-25311-1 (alternate, search)
If you want to avoid linking, enclose the text with nowiki tags, like this: <nowiki>InterWiki</nowiki>
Result: InterWiki
You can separate links from adjacent text with spaces or the special "" (two double-quotes) delimiter, like this: UseModWiki""s
Result: UseModWiki?s
The "" delimiter is not displayed -- it is useful for cases like plural forms of page links (such as UseModWiki?s).
Simple lists:
* Text for a bulleted list item. * Text for another bulleted list item. * Text for a third bulleted list item. ** Text for second-level list. *** Text for third level, etc.
...which looks like:
Numbered lists:
# Text for a numbered list item. # Text for another numbered list item. # Text for a third numbered list item. ## Text for second-level list. ### Text for third level, etc.
...which looks like:
Definition lists
Terms with indented definitions: [without a blank line between term and definition]
;Term One:Definition for One (indented) ;Term Two:Definition for Two (indented) ;Term Three:Definition for Three (indented) ;;Term (indented):Definition (indented two levels) ;;;Term (indented twice):Definition (indented to third level)
...which looks like:
Simple indented text:
: Paragraph to be indented (quote-block) :: Paragraph indented more ::: Paragraph indented to third level
...which looks like:
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.
Alternatively, multi-line sections can be marked as pre-formatted text with all other formatting suppressed by surrounding the text section with 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 <pre> formatted 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, PalmGrantWiki is not a link here, and '''this is not bold'''.
and:
This is the starting-spaces version of preformatted text. Note that links like PalmGrantWiki? still work.