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Wiki Notation Help
Most of the 'content' of your webpages can just be entered, just like you would write an email. The differences arise when you want to 'format' the text. This program is not a WYSIWYG ("what you see is what you get") editor, so you will have to type in some special characters to control formatting. Fortunately there are just a few simple things to learn and you will be able to make beautiful webpages. One of the advantages of this approach is how 'clean' the resulting pages are and how little space they take up. On a personal note: I find it extremely easy to cut and paste emails and other items I get into a page for future reference and sharing with others. So what are these 'few' formatting techniques?
Basic Formatting
- Paragraphs To create a new paragraph all you have to do is leave a blank line between sections of text.
- Line Breaks If you want some text to start on the next line without creating a new paragraph you should end the previous line with the accent "`" character.
- Horizontal Lines Often sections of text will be separated by something called a horizontal rule (or line). To do this on your pages you just enter "----" on a line by itself.
Font Appearance
- Italic for italic text put "{{" in front and "}}" behind the section you want italic.
- Bold for bold text put "{{{" in front and "}}}" behind the section you want bold.
- Heading to create a heading put "{{{{" in front and "}}}}" behind the section you want as a heading (see top of this page).
Lists of Lines
- Bullets To create a 'bulleted' list you must do three things - start the list, indicate the list items, and end the list.
- Start To start the list you place a "{-" at the beginning of the line of the first item in the list.
- Items The rest of the items in the list you place a " - " at the beginning of the line for each new item.
- End To properly end a list of items you must enter a " -}" after the last item in the list.
- Numbers To get a numbered list you use the 'number' sign "#" in place of the dash when making a list.
- Mixing You may 'nest' bulleted and numbered list in whatever way makes sense to you. The important thing to remember is to 'start' and 'end' each list correctly.
Tables of Information
- Like the lists of lines we can format our data into a tabular form. Again we will start a table with a symbol that starts with "{" and end it with one the ends with "}". Are you seeing a trend here? So the special characters are:
- Start a Table You can start a table two ways, "{| " or "{|| " - with the double vertical bar you get lines between the elements in your tables.
- Items in Table You must separate each 'item' in a table with " || " (note: spaces on either side are required).
- Ending a Table There is only one way to end a table at it is with a " ||}".
- Now I must point out that a table is a two-dimensional organization so the simple approach we used with the one-dimensional lists won't really work. But "no worries" if you remember to begin and end the table as I have already described and then remember to keep each line/row of the table on a single line. What this means is that the " || " not only separates items in a table but if it is found at the beginning or end of a line it is also used to begin or end a line/row in the table.
Links and Images
- Making a link to another webpage is simple, but it depends a bit on the kind of page you are linking to. If you are linking to a non-wiki page on your website - you do this by putting "[" before and "]" after the page name, with no spaces in there. If you want to name your page one thing and have something different show as the link to the page you can do that like this "[:clickable_link_text:pagename.php]". In your browser you will see a link that says "clickable link text" (yes, the underlines are converted to spaces) and when clicked on you will go to the page named "pagename.php". Please remember you choose your own names for pages and text to show for the link.
- If you want to have a link to a page in another website you just have to change one thing. Just use a complete URL that points to the other site in place of the pagename. Remember, still no spaces between the brackets and yes you can use the colons ":" to make up your own "link text value". So it should look something like this: "[:Google:http://www.google.com]" One last thing you use the single brackets for is to 'link' to a non-HTML item; such a PDF or MSWord document. Just place the name of the item inside the brackets, ex: "[2008AnnualMtg.pdf]".
- If you want to create a link to another wiki page you have created you will want to use double brackets. The correct format for a wiki page is "index.php?n=pagename". To save effort you can just enter [[pagename]] and the HTML generated will be in the correct format.
- To show an picture/image on your webpage is as simple as can be. Just put the name of the image file in there with no special characters or anything - you do have to include the ".GIF", ".JPG", or ".PNG" part of the file name. There should be spaces around the name for the program to find it, which means no spaces in the file name, but otherwise the correct picture should show up. One special way you can use image files is as the 'clickable' part of a link - the part between the ":"s which will give you a picture to click on to get to another page or site.
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