Simple editing is one of the major benefits of using a wiki. Users can edit pages without knowing HTML, and still use many formatting features of HTML. Most wikis define a set of formatting rules to convert plain text into HTML. Some wikis (like this one) also allow some HTML "tags", like <b>, <i>, and <pre> within a page. (Some wikis use raw HTML instead of special formatting rules.)

The following text is an overview of the SDxWiki text formatting rules. For examples without all the explanatory text, see the Text Formatting Examples. 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.

Basic Text Formatting:

Most text does not require any special changes for wiki form. A few basic rules are:

Do not indent paragraphs. (Indenting may cause your text to appear in a monospaced font.)
Leave a single blank line between paragraphs.
To create a horizontal line, type 4 or more minus/dash/hyphen (-) characters.
There is no need to encode HTML characters like <, >, or &.
HTML-encoded characters like < will not be translated.

Page, URL, Image, and InterWiki Links:

You can link to a page by surrounding its title with two pairs of square brackets, like so:

[[Text Formatting Rules]]

For instance, Text Formatting Rules and Text Formatting Examples 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.]

Inline image: http://www.usemod.com/wiki.gif

Inline link: http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?SandBox

InterWiki link:

You can separate links from adjacent text with spaces or the special "" (two double-quotes) delimiter. The "" delimiter is not displayed--it is useful for cases like plural forms of page links (such as UseModWiki""s). 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.

Bold, Italic and Fixed-width Text:

To mark text as bold, italic or fixed-width, you can use the HTML <b>, <i> and code tags. For example:

Sample <b>bold</b>, <i>italic</i>, and <b><i>bold+italic</i></b>.
Sample <code>fixed-width</code>.

looks like:

Sample bold, italic, and <i>bold+italic</i>. Sample fixed-width.

Note that UseModWiki (like most Wikis) processes pages line-by-line, so if you want three bold lines of text, you will need to use three separate <b>...</b> tags. Also note that unclosed or unmatched tags are not removed from the page.

UseModWiki also implements the old "quote style" of text formatting, which is used on several wikis. Briefly:

''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.

The "quote style" formatting is often confusing, especially when multiple bold and italic sections are mixed on a line. It may eventually be removed from UseModWiki.

Headings

Headings are delimited by 1-6 equal signs (=). They basically correspond to HTML's <h1> through <h6> tags.

= Headline size 1

== Headline size 2

=== Headline size 3

===

==== Headline size 4

====

===== Headline size 5

=====

====== Headline size 6

======

Lists:

Simple lists:

* Text for a bulleted list item.
** Text for second-level list.
*** Text for third level, etc.

...which looks like:

Text for a bulleted list item.
- Text for second-level list.
  - Text for third level, etc.

Numbered lists:

# Text for a numbered list item.
## Text for second-level list.
### Text for third level, etc.

...which looks like:

Text for a numbered list item.
Text for second-level list. 3. Text for third level, etc.

Indented Text:

Simple indented text:

: Text to be indented (quote-block)
:: Text indented more
::: Text indented to third level

...which looks like:

Text to be indented (quote-block)

Text indented more

Text indented to third level

Term with indented definition: [without a blank line between term and definition]

;Term:Definition (indented)
;;Term (indented):Definition (indented two levels)
;;;Term (indented twice):Definition (indented to third level)

...which looks like: ;Term:Definition (indented) ;;Term (indented):Definition (indented two levels) ;;;Term (indented twice):Definition (indented to third level)

Preformatted Text

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.

Additionally, multi-line sections can be marked as pre-formatted text using 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 preformatted 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, UseModWiki is not a link here.

and: This is the starting-spaces version of preformatted text. Note that links like UseModWiki still work.

Tables This UseMod wiki has been modified to allow simple tables. The text:

|a table|column one|column B|last column
|a row||peanuts|elephants

... ends up looking like this:

|a table|column one|column B|last column |a row||peanuts|elephants

Miscellaneous rules:

To quote text without applying the wiki formatting rules, enclose it within a <nowiki> ... </nowiki> section. Within a nowiki section, only HTML-quoting of special characters (<>&) will occur--no other formatting rules will be applied.
A line which ends in a backslash character () will be joined with the next line before most formatting rules are applied. This can be useful for breaking up long sections of text in line-sensitive sections (like lists or indented text).
If raw-HTML sections are enabled (they are disabled by default), you can enter raw HTML code within a <html> ... </html> section. Note that no quoting is done, so you will need to use sequences like < if you want to display a < character.
Most of the formatting rules are order-independent. On rare occasions the order of processing may be important. The rules are processed in the following order: raw HTML sections, HTML quoting, nowiki tags, backslash line joining, preformatted sections, paragraphs, lists and indented text, horizontal lines, italic/bold text, URLs, and finally ordinary WikiName links. [No longer fully accurate for 0.88, needs updating.]

Text Formatting Bugs

Why is there no way to make one line follow another without making it a separate paragraph and without making it part of a list? (What in HTML you'd do with a
tag.)

Also, is there any way to make nested lists of different types? For instance:

Top level

Next
Level

This should be numbered 2, but the numbering starts again at 1

Text Formatting Suggestions

One suggestion, it'd be nice if UseModWiki came with a sample wiki with documentation.

You mean, like http://ebooklib.com/wikiframe.txt which is a basic UseMod wiki with all the initial pages in text format. Page names are set off with >>>>>>. Start wtih your home page, copy and paste relevant page text into the Edit box, click Save, and the links for the next page are created and ready to go. Takes about 6 minutes to build a basic site with full user documentation. -- JerryMuelver Hey, cool. Thanks. It would still be nice if there was something distributed with UseModWiki so that people would have somewhere to start from.