Posted by Gremlin [24.8.18.225 - c-24-8-18-225.client.comcast.net] on 23 March 2004 at 01.09.54 ZuluTime:

In Reply to: Quick note on formatting posted by MondoHebe on 22 March 2004 at 23.47.24 ZuluTime:

This is a large question, of course. Although, in the interest of formatting, I've already taken a few liberties with the Perl script running the board. id est:
     Hit Enter once, and the script will automatically indent, just like in a novel....

Hit Enter twice, and it resets, which is good for a new section.

Basic formatting is tricky to illustrate when hypertext is allowed, since it tends to just take my word for it and format things whether I like it or not; there are tricks to dodge that, but, in my experience, Windoze Exploder tends to misunderstand them after the Perl is done guessing. So I have a simpler solution. The Artist Hitherto Known As Gremlin will now be represented by this symbol: £. Also, < will be represented by { and > will be }, since I'm not planning to use those for anything more appropriate anyway.

Italics: {I}whatever{/I}
     Most hypertext tags work like that; to turn them off again, you just mimic them, but add a slash [the questionmark without hitting shift] before the word or letter in the tag. The mnemonic behind {I} is, curiously enough, italic.

Bold
     Not surprisingly, it's a B. {B}whatever{/B}.

Underlined
     Underlining a word is accomplished by using {U}whatever{/U}. It's also a good way to make things look like a hyperlink, and become very dead in a large hurry. Avoid.

Blink
     Speaking of death, we finally got rid of the fucking {BLINK}whatever you want on your tombstone{/BLINK} tag; killing it saved the lives of millions of lusers; it doesn't work anymore; it sucked.

Font sizes
     This one's rarely needed for much, but it's possible. The default fontsize in here is Two. There are various ways to alter that. The easiest to remember is probably {H1}whatever{/H1}, which makes things pretty big; bigger still, and more logical, is {FONT SIZE="X"}whatever{/FONT}. Two factors: you don't use {/FONT SIZE} to shut this off; and the X represents a number from 1 through 7; the default is still 2.

Font faces
     Roughly the same as fontsizes, but, instead, you're using {FONT FACE="Arial"}the default font on this board{/FONT}. The trick with fucking with font faces is that it only works with fonts everyone has. So, {FONT FACE="Times New Roman"}whatever{/FONT} tends to be safer than {FONT FACE="Some Goofy Font I Found Online Today"}, which no one else has, and which is as likely as not to default to fucking Webdings.

Font colours
     Which is where you'll want to be friends with math. There are, in most modern computers, minimally 16,777,216 colours available for use on the 'net. Most of them are bad things to use. And, to me, they're all grey. But that's immaterial. As it happens, 16,777,216 is sixteen to the sixth. Therefore, the hexadecimal [of or having to do with sixteen numbers] codes are six characters long.
     Each of the six characters can be any of sixteen characters, from zero through F. Because we run out of numbers after nine. So the field is 0123456789ABCDEF.
     From that, given that zero, in computers, will always equate to 'off' [even though one, in this case, is 'really very much nearly off'], the tag of {FONT COLOR="#000000"} works out to {FONT COLOR="black"}. Antithetically, {FONT COLOR="#FFFFFF"} turns the font white.
     Since it's at this point that people start asking why in hell you can't just tell a computer {FONT COLOR="white"} or {FONT COLOR="blue"} or {FONT COLOR="red"}, I'll let you in on the secret: you can. But: some browsers are elitist purists which won't acknowedlge that, and there really aren't quite sixteen million, seven hundred seventy-seven thousand, two hundred sixteen different words for colours, despite Crayola's intentions. So, stick to primaries and secondaries: red, blue, green, yellow, orange, purple, black, white, and so on. I think {FONT COLOR="chartreuse"} might work, but let's never find out.

Fontbuilding
     If you really need to do something weird to a font, you can, in fact, use {FONT FACE="Comic Sans MS" SIZE="7" COLOR="red"}to produce this; just remember to shut it off again with a single{/FONT} tag. Which is to say that, if you turn on one instance of {FONT WHATEVER}, you'll have to turn it off again with a {/FONT}; if you turn on seventeen, you'll need seventeen closing tags to kill it all.

Hyperlinks
     The easy method is to look down slightly at the Optional Link URL field, and just type the thing in--or copypaste it. Otherwise, it's an anchor tag, which used to have more potential meaning than it really has anymore. Nowadays, it pretty well means that the tag is just {A HREF="http://gremlin.net"}The Gremlin Empire{/A}. Kinda like the {/FONT} thing, you only need the first word in the shutoff. Oh, and seriously important, you will need the 'http://' in the URL, whether there's a 'www.whatever.com' after it or not; otherwise, the browser won't get that it's a real site. Bear that in mind.

Advanced Users
     Yes, it's true, you can now use {A HREF="http://gremlin.net" TARGET="_BLANK"}The Gremlin Empire{/A} to have the link open in a new window. Which tends to be amazingly useful in a lot of cases. We'll throw that in free, along with a set of steak knives.

Images
     Better than knives, actually, we'll toss in your very own Image Source, not-particularly-mnemoncally known as {IMG SRC="http://gremlin.net/whatever.jpg">. There's no cutoff tag for this one; that alone makes an image happen. Also, the Optional Image URL, below, saves some time if you just wanna thump the image in at the top.
     Incidentally, {A HREF="http://gremlin.net" TARGET="_BLANK"}{IMG SRC="http://gremlin.net/images/gif/gremlin.gif"}{/A} would turn an image into a link. There are lots of neat parameters for images, like borders and heigths and widths and...if you're reading this, you're probably happier not knowing about all that.

Formatting
     Since that was technically the question in the first place, the formatting defaults to justified text, so the words all line up nicely on either side. If that's not good enough for you, you can hit Enter a couple of times to get away from the indent, and use {P ALIGN="CENTER"} to centre the next line, or {P ALIGN="RIGHT"} to smash it all up against the right side, or even {P ALIGN="LEFT"} to leave it where it is, but without the sherryside justification, if you really want that. The idea behind the tag is Paragraph Alignment, shortened to P ALIGN.
     Turning it off manually is a simple matter of adding {/P} at the end of the line. Simpler than that is hitting Enter a couple of times, so the script can get back to it's usual job.

Duh
     Spelling counts. As much as I wish someone at CERN or the W3C or the CIA or NASDAQ would allow hypertext to work with {FONT COLOUR="whatever"} and {P ALIGN="CENTRE"}, they're just not going for it yet. Misspell a word, forget a space, add a space, or blink, and something will go much wrong.
     So, when you hit Prevue the sucker...., you go to a secondary screen where you can find out what you got wrong. Also, it's a neat IQ test for trolls, who usually neglect to notice the doubleposting hitch. One clever hint....
     When the message is finished [or so you'd thought] and you're about to Prevue the sucker, take half a second to cutpaste the entirely of the message you think you're posting. If it turns out that you have to change something, you can just backspace to the entry field to fix it; but, in cases, browsers will kinda reset the whole field; it doesn't hurt to have the latest edit ready to paste back in and modify slighty.