This is a page on how to format pages for them to be displayed nicely in the Wiki.

Contents

• Contents
• Headings
• Heading Level 1
  • Heading Level 2
• Heading Level 1
  • Heading Level 2
• Text Styles
• Links
• Pagebreaks
• Paragraphs
• Lists
• Preformatting
• Quotes
• Tables
• Styles
• Commands

Headings

There are two levels of headings, marked either by equals signs on either side of a line of text, or by "underlining" them on the next line of text:

 === Heading Level 1 ===
 == Heading Level 2 ==    
 Heading Level 1
 ===============
 Heading Level 2
 ---------------

Heading Level 1

Heading Level 2

Heading Level 1

Heading Level 2

Text Styles

 normal - /italics/ - *bold* - **bold-italic** - $strike$ - ``monospace``

normal - italics - bold - bold-italic - strike - monospace

Text in monospace isn't processed for other wiki markup. If you don't need to include a ` in a monospace section, you can just use single backquotes instead of double.

Links

Internal wiki links are any valid page name enclosed in square brackets: [Page] becomes Page?. Page names on this wiki can only contain letters and numbers, and must start with a capital letter. You can link to a subpage by starting the link with a slash: /Page? for instance. You can link to a sibling of a page (a subpage of the parent of this page) by starting the link with a dot: .Page? for instance. These are only useful if subpages and hierarchies are allowed in the wiki, of course.

InterWiki links take the form [WikiName:PageInThatWiki]. The WikiName has to have been added by the admin of the wiki for it to work.

External links can take three forms:

• Inline URLs are automatically converted into links, like http://ajps.mine.nu/whicky/

• You can link a piece of text by enclosing it in square brackets and putting the URL in brackets after it:

    [a wiki] (http://ajps.mine.nu/whicky/ "Optional title")
  

  a wiki

• In cases where the URL is very long, or the text becomes difficult to read, you can put a reference after the bracketted text. References should be short and are limited to lower case letters and numbers.

    [a wiki][1], or [another wiki][whicky]
  

  with the definition anywhere else in the document:

    [1]: http://ajps.mine.nu/whicky/
    [whicky]: http://ajps.mine.nu/whicky/ "Optional title"
  

  a wiki, or another wiki

Pagebreaks

Pagebreaks are simply four or more dashes on a line by themself. They represent a logical break in the page.

 ----

Paragraphs

Paragraphs can be split over different lines if you find it easier to keep the text in order that way. The markup engine combines them into a paragraph before displaying them. Paragraphs are ended by a blank line or by some other sort of markup starting, such as a list, indented area or table. If you need to put in a linebreak inside a paragraph, just leave at least two spaces at the end of a line as this will ensure the following newline isn't removed.
Like that.

Lists

Lists can take different forms: bullet-pointed, numbered, lettered and so on. Unordered lists can use * or - interchangably as bullet points:

  - Keyboard
  - Mouse
  - Monitor

• Keyboard
• Mouse
• Monitor

Ordered lists use numbers, letters, or roman numerals followed by full-stops:

  1. One
  2. Two
  3. Three

1. One
2. Two
3. Three

  i. One
  ii. Two
  iii. Three 

1. One
2. Two
3. Three

  a. One
  b. Two
  c. Three

1. One
2. Two
3. Three

The order of the numbers or letters doesn't matter - only the first one is used to determine the list type and the others are just there to allow you to keep the source for a page looking neat if you want it to. List items can contain other blocks, such as sublists, tables, and so on - but they all have to be indented to the level of the item, like so:

  - This item is formatted over a couple of lines, 
    and contains a numbered sublist to illustrate
    a point:

     1. One
     2. Two
     3. Three

  - The first list then continues on.     

• This item is formatted over a couple of lines, and contains a numbered sublist to illustrate a point:

  1. One
  2. Two
  3. Three

• The first list then continues on.

Preformatting

Preformatted text can be useful for sections of code, or for demonstrating what markup looks like on a wikipage without actually triggering the markup, because it isn't parsed for normal wiki markup.

The area to be preformatted is simply indented from where "normal text" would be by 4 spaces. This means that it is 4 spaces in from the left edge in the middle of normal text, or 4 spaces in from the edge of a list item text if in a list, and so on. 4 spaces are stripped from the beginning of each line when it is inserted into the final page.

  __  __             _
 |  \/  | ___   ___ | |
 | |\/| |/ _ \ / _ \| |
 | |  | | (_) | (_) |_|
 |_|  |_|\___/ \___/(_)

Quotes

Quoting is done using the standard email quoting character >. Quotes can contain most other elements, so you can quote lists or tables, for instance.

 > This is a quote:
 >  - Electrical work: £250
 >  - Plastering: £300
 >  - Roofing: £975

This is a quote:

• Electrical work: £250
• Plastering: £300
• Roofing: £975

Quotes can have attributions after them by following them with a line starting '-- ':

 > *Magnet*, /n./: Something acted upon by magnetism
 >
 > *Magnetism*, /n./: Something acting upon a magnet.
 >
 > The two definitions immediately foregoing are
 > condensed from the works of one thousand
 > eminent scientists, who have illuminated the
 > subject with a great white light, to the
 > inexpressible advancement of human knowledge.

 -- Ambrose Bierce, /The Devil's Dictionary/

Magnet, n.: Something acted upon by magnetism

Magnetism, n.: Something acting upon a magnet.

The two definitions immediately foregoing are condensed from the works of one thousand eminent scientists, who have illuminated the subject with a great white light, to the inexpressible advancement of human knowledge.

Tables

To make a table you start and end the table row with the table marker (||), and separate cells in the row with the same marker, e.g.

 || A simple table || With one row || And three cells ||

You can mark the top row of the table as column headings by putting a line of dashes enclosed in table markers below that row, like so:

 || Country || Currency ||
 ||---------------------||
 || UK      || Pounds   ||
 || USA     || Dollars  ||
 || Ireland || Euros    ||

You can make table cells which span more than one column by leaving all but the last of the column spaces completely empty. e.g.

 || Column One || Column Two || Column Three ||
 |||| This spans two columns || This doesn't ||

There are various different options for the presentation and layout of tables which are all written enclosed in angle brackets <> immediately after the opening table markers (||) of a table, row or cell depending on the option being set. The various options, and examples of their use, are described below.

• A more general way of marking cells spanning more than one column or row.
  Cells spanning rows use the notation |x or rowspan="x" where x is the number of rows the cell spans. Similarly, column-spanning cells can be marked -x or colspan="x". In both cases, you just omit definitions for the cells whose positions are filled by the bigger cell. i.e. in the example below, there is only one cell in the second row of the definition because the first column is filled by the cell on the line above, and there is only one cell on the bottom row because it spans both columns of the table.

    ||<|2> 2 rows        || row 1        ||
    ||                      row 2        ||
    ||<colspan="2"> row 3 over 2 columns ||
  

  2 rows	row 1
  	row 2
  row 3 over 2 columns

• horizontal and vertical alignments, which are represented as ) for right alignment, : for centering, ( for left alignment, ^ for top and v for bottom. e.g.

    ||<(> left     ||<^|3> top ||<v|3> bottom ||
    ||<:> centered ||
    ||<)> right    ||
  

  left	top	bottom
  centered
  right

• Cell widths, which are simply written as a percentage in the given cell:

    || narrow ||<99%> wide ||
  

  narrow

  wide

• Background colours for cells, which take 6-character hexadecimal values just like in HTML. These are either explicitly labelled with bgcolor= or else just left marked with the #, like so:

    ||<#FF8080> red ||<bgcolor="#80FF80"> green ||<#8080FF> blue ||
  

  red

  green

  blue

• Background colours for entire table rows, which take values in the same way as the cell colours, but are marked with rowbgcolor=

    ||<rowbgcolor="#FFFFDD"> Row One ||
    ||<rowbgcolor="#FFDDFF"> Row Two ||
  

  Row One

  Row Two

• Table width can be specified on the first row of a table only. Like cell widths, table width is expressed as a percentage. It is set using the tablewidth label:

    ||<tablewidth="100%"> A wide table ||
  

  A wide table

Styles

It is possible to mark a section of the page or of the text to be rendered in a different style. This results in a <div> or <span> element being inserted with a class attribute containing the given style name. The idea is that if you want to be able to mark a section of text as spoilers on a wiki discussing a television programme, for instance, you can set up a rule in your stylesheet to hide text styled as spoiler by default. Styled areas are marked up using {stylename} and {/stylename} around the area to be styled.

There is a style USER_red_text defined in the CSS file, and I can use {red_text} or {red text} to mark areas to be printed in red (spaces are translated into underscores in order to work with CSS). The styles are preceded by USER_ so that wiki users can't access any rule in your CSS, only those you choose to set up. In many cases, there will be no need for them at all.

 This is {red text}red{/red text} you see.

This is red you see.

Commands

WikiCommands can be used to insert dynamically-generated content into a page. For instance, the RecentChanges page uses the command <<recentchanges>> to insert the latest wiki changes. The most generally useful command is the one used at the top of this page to automatically generate a list of page contents based on the headings used in the page: <<contents>>. The full list is as follows: