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FORMATTING HELP
Basic formatting commands
Headers
- The use of headers allow you to break an article up into several sections. This allows you to signal to the reader what the following text is about. This is particularly useful if you are creating long, detailed articles
- Headers are created by using two or more equal signs.
- A "first order" header is created with two equal signs before and after the title of the header
- A "second order" header is created with three equal signs before and after the title of the subheader
- Generally speaking, it is better to not go deeper than third order headers. Going deeper than that often reduces clarity, and is makes the thread of the article difficult to follow. If a fourth order header seems to be needed, consider creating a separate supporting article.
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New section
Subsection
Sub-subsection
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==New section==
===Subsection===
====Sub-subsection====
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- Some tips for the use of headers.
- Do not use first-level headings (=). Those are reserved for other purposes
- Start with a second-level heading (==);
- If you create one second-level heading, make sure that there is at least one other second-level heading. Otherwise there's no point in creating the first header
- Don't skip levels (for example, second-level followed by fourth-level).
- Though you can create a fourth-level header, those are usually best avoided, as that reduces the readability of the article. If you really need a fourth-level header, you might be better served by creating a separate supporting article.
- A Table of Contents will automatically be added to an article that has four or more sections and subsections.
- Clicking the
 at the top of the edit page will create a second level or Headline Text tag: ==Headline text== for you to use.
New Paragraph?
- Just leave a blank line to start a new paragraph.
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This is paragraph 1.
This is paragraph 2.
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This is paragraph 1.
This is paragraph 2.
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Bold, Italics, or Indentation?
- To italicize a word, put it between 2 apostrophes (Note: although they appear similar, quotation marks do not italicize.). To make a word bold, put it between 3 apostrophes. To indent a paragraph, use a colon as the first character on the line. See table below for examples:
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italicized word
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''italicized'' word
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bolded word
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'''bolded''' word
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- Indented paragraph.
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:Indented paragraph.
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- You can also create Bold and Italic text by using the
 and the  tabs at the top of any edit page.
- Highlight the word or phrase you wish to change and click either of the tabs
- To change text to BOTH Bold and Italic: Highlight the text and press the Bold tab and then with the text still highlighted press the Italic tab.
- The result of using both would be: This text is Bold and Italic
Center Text
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Center this Text
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<center>Center this Text</center>
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Underline
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Underline
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<u>Underline</u>
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Strike Through
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Strikeout
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<s>Strikeout</s>
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Font Color and Size
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Normal Font
Font Size
Font Color
Font Color and Size
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Normal Font
<font size="+2">Font Size</font>
<font color="red">Font Color</font></pre>
<font color="red" size="+2">Font Color and Size</font>
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Table of Contents
A Table of Contents helps the reader navigate through and article, and find the specific information that they need. TOCs are created anytime an article contains four or more sections. TOCs are nonetheless not required. They normally appear at the top of the page, but you can place them anywhere you want, or decide to not show them at all.
- If you want the table of contents to appear in a different place, type __TOC__ where you want it to be. You can also force it to the right or left of the page by typing {{TOCright}} or {{TOCleft}}. See wikipedia page for further help. Note that in this case a double underline is required on either side of "NOTOC".
- If you type __NOTOC__ anywhere on the page. that will remove the TOC. Again, not the need for the double underline on either side of "NOTOC".
Page Organization
Page Length
- There is no limit to the length of a given page, but a very long page will take longer to load.
- If an article's getting overly long, and takes a lot of time to load, you might want to consider placing some of the material in supporting pages., and link to those support articles in the main page.
Subpages
- Person and Family pages cannot have subpages in the same namespace.
- You can, however, create and link to other types of pages and place content from the the Person or Family page to the supporting page that will house that information.
- As an example:
- If your are writing about a particular person (Person space) you might want to explain how you identified their parents.
- If the explanation was very extensive it might clutter-up your person article, making it difficult to follow.
- A solution to that would be to create a supporting page in "article" space explaining the how you determined the identity of their parents.
- That way your main article would be less cluttered and easier to read. Anyone interested in how you identified the persons parents could find you reasoning in the support article.
Use of Headers
- If you have a lot of text, use headers and subheaders.
- See [discussion].
Image Location on a Page
- When you put an image in the text box, the system will arrange them in as efficient display as possible. This means that smaller images are often interspersed within the text, or move around when the user changes the width of their browser window. You can prevent this by adding the following on a separate line under the image tag:
-
- You can also position the image on the right, left or center by placing a bar after the image title followed by the position word. For instance:
- Image:Title of image.
Line Breaks
- If you have a line of text you would like to force to the next line, use the <br> tag
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I want to force this text to the next line here
and let it begin on the next line.
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I want to force this text to the next line here<br>and let it begin on the next line.
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Show Wiki Formatting
- Sometimes you need to show how some formatting method is being used. For example, this is needed repeatedly on this help page.
- This is done using the <nowiki></nowiki> tags.
- For example:
- The following shows the reader the tags needed to show how you can place and image on a page:
- <nowiki>[[Image:xxxx.jpg]]</nowiki> tag you can place an image on your page.
- An easy way to insert the <nowiki></nowiki> tags.
- At the top of the editing page is an icon
 that will produce the nowiki tag for you:
- <nowiki>Insert non-formatted text here</nowiki>
Footnotes
To create a footnote in the narrative section of a Person or Family page, add a source citation or note in the appropriate section, and then use <ref name="S#/> or <ref name="N#/> in the narrative, where S# is the source number assigned to the source citation or N# is the note number assigned to the note.
To create a footnote on another type of page, use <ref name="xxx">Footnote text</ref> (where xxx is a unique name), and place <references/> at the end of the page, under a heading such as Footnotes or References. The footnote in this example can be reused by referring to its name, e.g., <ref name="xxx"/>. Note that xxx cannot be just a number.
For more information and advanced techniques, see How to create a footnote in narrative text. Sign Name
- There are occasions when you need to identify yourself on a WeRelated Page. You might, for example, bring something up on the Watercolor, where a "Signature" is very desirable. Similarly, you might want to place a comment on a talk page, and people need to know who left the comment so they can properly respond. Adding a signature can be done in several ways.
- Use the signature button on the edit menu
 (easiest way)
- manually add --~~~~ after your comment. (Sightly harder). Note that this is two dashes and four cedillas.
- The latter approach looks like this:
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--Dallan 14:42, 24 March 2006 (MST)
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--~~~~
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Special Characters
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Lists,Tables and Templates
Lists
- You can create either bulleted or numbered lists. To create a bulleted list, put a * as the first character on each line; to create a numbered list, put a # as the first character on each line.
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* Item 1
* Item 2
** Item 2.2
* Item 3
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- Item 1
- Item 2
- Item 2.2
- Item 3
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# Item 1
# Item 2
## Item 2.2
# Item 3
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Tables
- If you enter:
| header 1
| header 2
| header 3
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| row 1, cell 1
| row 1, cell 2
| row 1, cell 3
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| row 2, cell 1
| row 2, cell 2
| row 2, cell 3
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- You get:
| header 1
| header 2
| header 3
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| row 1, cell 1
| row 1, cell 2
| row 1, cell 3
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| row 2, cell 1
| row 2, cell 2
| row 2, cell 3
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- For details see the excellent discussion on Wikipedia
Templates
- There are some pieces of html coding that are used repetitively on different pages. Templates simplify putting these repetitive materials on to pages where needed. Some templates are more or less standard, and created for administrative purposes. As an example the "Speedy Delete" template cane used if someone decides a page they created is no longer needed. Add the speedy delete template, and a reason for deleting the page, and an administrator will take care of the problem.
- Templates can also be created by individual users for specialized purposes. There are many thousands of such templates.
- You can use a template by typing {{the name of the template}} on your page. For instance, {{Welcome1}} is the welcome message to new users.
Links
Link to WeRelate Page
- To create a link to another WeRelate page, place the title of the wiki page within double brackets. You can follow the title with a | and some text if you want different text displayed in place of the title.
- You can also click the
 tab at the top of the edit page to set up the internal link
- Some examples of Internal WeRelate Links:
Link to a Section
- You can create a link to another section of the same page.
- Wiki software automatically creates anchors for each title in a document, and may be linked to by adding '#' before the text of the title in the link.
- For Example If you wanted to refer to the article above "Link to a WeRelate Page" you would enter:
- [[#How do I create a link to another WeRelate page?|Linking to another WeRelate page]]
- Anchor elements may also be created by using the id attribute in accepted HTML elements (eg. FONT, SPAN, etc.). The A element is not one of the accepted elements. The name assigned using the id attribute must be unique and not used by any other anchors in the document.
- For Example: If you wanted to create an anchor at the beginning of the previous sentence, you could enter:
- *<span id="myAnchor">Anchor</span> elements may also be created by using ...
Link to a Web Page
- To create a link to an external web page, place the URL of the web page, followed by the text of the link, within single brackets. Don't forget the http://!
- You can also click on the
 icon at the top of the edit page to set up an external link
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FamilySearch
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[http://www.familysearch.org FamilySearch]
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Wikipedia
To create a link to Wikipedia, type [[wikipedia:Title of page|Text of link]]. For example, to link to Wikipedia's main page, with the link appearing as the word "Wikipedia", you would type [[wikipedia:Main page|Wikipedia]]. It would appear on your page as Wikipedia. Note that the Wikipedia designator is not capitalized and there is no space after the colon (:).
An alternate Method:
- Copy the link from the WikiPedia Page and paste it into an external link tag [ ]
- The External Tag Setup</font>: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln Abraham Lincoln]
- WikiPedia Link</font>: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/abraham_Lincoln
- Text you want to be visible on the page</font>: Abraham Lincoln
- Result: Abraham Lincoln
Redirects
- In the first line of the Edit Page type: #redirect[[Place:Indiana, United States]]
- The text between the double brackets is the page you want the current page Redirected to
- MUST be the first line in the Text area for this command to work
- For detailed directions see the Redirect Help Page
- Another use: Creating an alternative Place Name for a page
- Caution: everything on the redirected page is lost! Make sure you move information unique to the redirected page over to the surviving page.
Images
- The inclusion of images, be they photographs of ancestors, maps, artwork, etc. helps add interest and information to a page. There are two basic steps in getting an image onto a page.
- 1. Upload Image: See upload the image. Please make sure that you are not violating someone else's copyright when you do so.
- 2. Add a link to it on the page where you want it to appear.
- Image Link i.e. [[Image:WeRelate.gif]] will place a copy of the image on the page as shown below
- Media Link i.e. [[media:WeRelate.gif]] will place a link to that image on the page as shown below
- 3. You can also use the Image button
 or the Media button  at the top of the text edit screen to produce the Image and Media tags for you. **Simply replace the "Example.xxx" with the name of your image file
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[[Image:WeRelate.gif]]
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Media:WeRelate.gif
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[[Media:WeRelate.gif]]
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- For more information concerning Images such as Preparing them for upload, how to upload, Annotating, placing them on a page and creating an image gallery see: the Images Tutorial
- To learn advanced image formatting techniques, visit the Wikipedia Image Formatting page.
Tags
- Websites, such as WeRelate, use HTML" tags" to format and display information on a webpage. They are normally hidden from the readers view, but you can see them here when you edit a page. When editing the tags are easily identifiable because they are surrounded by angle brackets (< >). Different tags contain different instructions on how to display information. For example <b> will bold a bit of text. and </b>will turn off the bolding, while <nowiki><i>and </i> turns italics on and off. If what you are doing is adding vita information to a person page, you do not neccesarily need to make use of these tags. If you start getting into writing articles, adding photographs, or even audio recordings, they can come into play if you choose. On WeRelate there are easier ways to handle basic formatting tasks.
- We relate has a special set of WeRelate tags that can be used. These tags can be inserted manually, just like HTML tags, but their real advantage lies in the use of the "editing menu" that appears above the editing field when you open a page to make changes. That bar contains nine "buttons", each of which does one of the most common editing requirements, and eliminate the need for many html tags. To use them highlight the text you want to format, and click the appropriate button, B for bold, for example, and the corresponding code will be added to the text. You can add italics, link to another WeRelate page, link to an external page on say FindaGrave, add a subsection, insert a photograph, sign your name, etc. Using these built in formatting tools greatly simplifies many of the tasks typically needed when an article is being created and reducing the need to use HTML tags.
- Below are examples of two tags both in HTML and WeRelate format to show the comparison
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Bold
Italic
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'''Bold'''
''Italic''
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<b>Bold></b>
<i>Italic></i>
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"Do Not Use" Tags
- Standard HTML includes some tags that don't work in WeRelate.
- The following tags fall into this class, and should not be used:
- href Tag <a href="http://www.google.com">googl</a>
- Image source tag <img src="xxx"/>
Learn More
- You have several options:
- If you like to learn by example, you can go to a page that has a format (table, list, heading, etc.) that you would like to use and click on the Edit (or View source) link at the top of that page to see how that page is formatted.
- You can practice and share your formatting techniques in the Sandbox.
- If you'd like to learn about more advanced formatting techniques such as tables, see Wikipedia's excellent article on formatting.
- If you have questions that aren't answered by this page, please send an email to [email protected].
- Regardless of how you learn, use the Show preview button as you're editing the page to experiment with different formatting options.
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