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 lists in whatever way makes sense to you. The important thing to remember is to 'start' and 'end' each list correctly.

Links and Images

• If you want to create a new wiki page or show a link to an existing page you will want to use double brackets. Let's say you want to call the page "MyTrip" - all you have to do when entering the wiki code is type in "[[MyTrip]]" - that's it. When you look at the page you have created you will see a link "MyTrip" - click on it and it will allow you to enter the wiki code for the new page.
• If you want to have a link to a page in another website you just have to change one thing - use single brackets. Just use a complete URL that points to the other site in place of the pagename. For example to link to Google you would enter "[http://www.google.com/]" - easy! One last thing you use the brackets for is to 'link' to a non-HTML item; such a PDF or MSWord document.
• 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.