# Text Layout and Formatting Guide

The input text for wiki pages is meant to be very simple. In most cases, will you need to do is paste in the text you want in the page, with a blank line between paragraphs, and you are done.

This page came with the default Quickie installation. Like all wiki pages, this page can be edited. If you find something which needed more explaining please email your improvements to Peter Miller so that they can be included in the next release.

There is also a brief summary of this page made available on all edit pages.

## No HTML Markup

Please don't try to use HTML markup in your wiki pages, it simply will not work. This is intentional; trying to mix wiki markup and HTML markup on the same page is unreasonably difficult, considering what a wiki is supposed to be.

If you know enough HTML to be tempted to use it, maybe you should consider dumping the wiki concept and simply write HTML pages instead.

## Comments

You can put comments in your wiki files that will not show in the final page displayed to readers.

    # This is an example comment.

Lines with a hash (`#`) character at the start of the line are treated as comments.

## Headings

To get headings in your text, you need a line which starts with an exclamation mark. It will look something like this:

    ! My Heading

The number of exclamation marks controls the style of the heading. Top level headings get one exclamation mark, the next level get two, etc.

If your wiki page has a level one heading as its first line, that heading will be used for the page heading, rather than a "pretty version" of the page's name.

## Emphasis

Your can add emphasis to your text with bold and italic markup.

You get italics by surrounding your text with pairs of single quote (`'`) characters. For example

    ''hello''

becomes hello.

You get bold by surrounding your text with pairs of underscore (`_`) characters. For example

    __hello__

becomes hello.

## Mono-spaced Text

There are two ways to get `mono-spaced text`, sometimes called fixed-width.

Inline text as you see in this paragraph is produced by having two opening braces in a row `{ {` to start the mono-spaced text, and then two closing braces in a row `} }` to finish. Text like this is still subject to the usual `bold markup` and `italic markup` sequences.

The second way is to have sets of triple braces. Text of the form { { { blah blah } } } appears like this:

    blah blah

within this text, there is no additional markup interpretation. This is useful for inserting software code examples.

## Links

You can put links to other wiki pages using `}} square brackets {{?` around the name of the wiki page to be linked. For example,

    [index]

is the markup needed to produce this link: index. This link will take you back to the default front page of this wiki.

If you create a link to a wiki page which does not exist (perhaps because you are about to create it) a following question mark will be highlighted. If you click on it, you will be taken to the edit page for the new wiki page.

If you want to have different text than the wiki page title as the text highlighted by the link, you specify the text after the page name, separated by a vertical bar (`|`) symbol. For example,

    [index|the front page]

is the markup needed to produce this link: the front page.

All of the usual markup, such as bold and italic text, may be used in the right-hand half of this kind of link markup. However, you can't nest links.

### Categories

You can divide your wiki pages into categories by using slash `/` characters between the wiki words. For example, the Quickie manual is a category called "manual", so a link to this manual page would look like

    [manual/markup]

and other manual pages can be linked in a similar way. When you do not provide a default heading, the slash turns into a space when the default page heading is calculated.

### External Links

You can link to ordinary web pages by using a very similar notation to internal links. For example,

    [http://quickie.sourceforge.net/]

is the markup needed to produce this link: http://quickie.sourceforge.net/. The text which is highlighted by link is the same as the link itself. You will notice that external links have a little arrow next to them, to tell you that the link is to an web page outside this wiki.

If you would like to change the highlighted text, use the same style of link as for internal links. For example,

    [http://quickie.sourceforge.net/|Quickie Home Page]

is the markup needed to produce this link: Quickie Home Page.

Just as for internal links, you can have additional markup in the right-hand half of this kind of link.

# Style Sheets

You can use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to customise the appearance of your wiki pages. Best of all, CSS changes take effect immediately, there is no need to regenerate the HTML from the wiki text.

The default style sheet may be found in the admin/default.css file of your wiki tree. Even though you can view it here, you will have to edit it with a text editor from outside Quickie.

The name of the style sheet file may be altered using the style-sheet-name field of the configuration settings.

More information about CSS, including tutorials, can be found on the learning CSS page.

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This content last modified Thu Oct 12 10:40:49 2017. This html text generated Thu Oct 12 10:40:50 2017.