Summary & FAQs

Upside Down Typography

You can do most basic formatting on the wiki using the Editor toolbar that appears while you are in Editing mode but there may be times when you need to apply more sophisticated syntax. You do this by applying wiki markup manually to the text you are creating.

To italicise and bold text, you surround the text you wish to format with 2 or 3 single quotes (') respectively. Headings are created by surrounding text with equals signs (=). Lists are either bulleted (*) or numbered (#).

If your formatting does not appear to be working, there may be a simple mark-up error, for example:

• With headings, check to see that you have the same number of equal signs before and after the heading text.
• Similarly, with bold and italics you should check that the same number of single quotation marks (') are used before and after the text being formatted.

Soon you will become quite adept at spotting syntax errors. One advantage with a wiki is that every edit is recorded, so its relatively easy to fix any mistakes. Remember that the Help link in the navigation sidebar appears on every page and can be used to access all of the available help pages on the wiki including this Tutorial.

Activity

Refining your user page The purpose of this activity is to use the skills you learned in this tutorial to improve the structure, layout and content of your User page. Go to your User page (which you can access by clicking on your User name after the image at the very top of the page) and: see how you can improve the structure and content of your user page by adding headings and subheadings; review your text to see whether you can improve the layout by adding emphasis (bold and italics). Are there parts that may communicate more effectively by adding a bullet or numbered list?

Frequently asked questions (FAQs)

• List your questions here ....

• In the activity involving numbered lists, I noticed that the numbering of subordinate points does not follow the usual format of 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, etc. Instead, only the final digit (i.e. 1, 2, 3, etc.) shows up at the point of indentation. Is is possible to create a numbered list with compound numbering (e.g. 2.1.3)? (submitted by ED)

• When I tried to indent a heading manually, either by using ==: or :==, this did not show up in the preview pane. I assume this is because the heading is a macro that incorporates a number of different bits of formatting. Is it possible to change the appearance of headings by editing a heading master or are these fixed? (submitted by ED)

• when trying to reformat ordinary text (e.g. in the My Sandbox exercise) under my personal profile and wanting to change the text into italics, I couldn't do this all at once. Even though I highlighted the entire text and choose the "italic" feature, saving it and using the Toolbar under the Editing button, it would only reformat the first paragraph into italics. Consequently, I had to repeat the process three times for three paragraphs. Is this intended by the programme? (submitted by Patricia)

Patricia: it seems that you are correct and the program will only allow you to italicise one paragraph at a time. It's possible that it doesn't really like the line break in between the paragraphs. brent 04:49, 26 March 2007 (CEST)

• Is there not an html toggle button available in WikiEducator if you prefer to use that (Maggy)

Maggy, if you know HTML you can use a lot of traditional HTML tags within the Wiki environment. We use quite a lot of traditional HTML to create the templates you see on these pages. brent 04:49, 26 March 2007 (CEST)

• When making a list with bullet points, how can I start a new line/paragraph but ensure that the text underneath the bullet point is indented in the same way as the text next to the bullet point (as both are meant to belong to the same bullet point)? User:LondonDan 03:21 pm (GMT)

• I tried to use indent ":" and "#" for a numbered list and this worked well. However, when I then tried to add in an additional level to numbering and used "::" and "##" an extra line with a single number one was inserted. How can I get rid of this extra line and 1. Interestingly, the lower number level works fine when I used "::" and "*". (John McBride)

• In my Sandbox activity to add bullets I noticed that a bullet appears in the view window that I do not wish to be there and yet I cannot see it when I am in the edit mode to correct it. It has no text - just a bullet (Yasmeen).

• I know this is not about bold and italics, but i have been trying today to insert a powerpoint as a slideshow onto my Antarctica site for children from different schools to view. I have managed it in odp format as open office but that cannot be seen by children that don't have open office. What format should I upload it as for enabling other users to view it? Thanks Trisha Korth

There are a couple of things that you can do: 1) Export the Open Office slide show as a macromedia swf file. Upload it and the original to Wikeducator.Add the swf to a page using the <flash> tag and you could add a link to the original file. For example, see User:Kruhly/Flash#Open_Office_Impress_swf_export this page. Switching slides is a click or double click on the slide. 2) If you are feeling energetic and you want to add audio to your slideshow, you might want to have a look at the Slide show demo page. Rob Kruhlak

• Italics and bold for a single quote??Hartmr 08:44, 13 December 2009 (UTC)

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