Help on Writing Wiki Formatted Pages

Wiki formatted pages provide a facility for marking up plain text with intuitive, human readable formatting that will be converted to XHTML when displayed. The big advantages are that you do not need to learn HTML to produce quite complex results, and that the text you write looks good to the eye even before conversion. It is a real alternative to saving Word files as HTML retaining the ability to edit the resource online.

You should enter basically plain text. There are a number of special characters you can add to insert formatting

### Block level formatting

Paragraph blocks are separated by at least one blank line. To add special formatting to a paragraph add one of the following special characters in the first character of the first line of the block followed by a space...

Character | Block Type
--- | ---
No character | Ordinary paragraph
> | Quotation
Space | Preformatted Text (Monospaced)
% | Preformatted and Wikki formatting is ignored
!# | Heading - where # is 1-6, the heading level (1 is biggest)

### List Formatting

Simple lists can be constructed easily by placing a special character at the start of each line in the list followed by a space. The list is terminated by a blank line. At present lists cannot be intermixed or nested. Definition list definitions and text types may be freely intermixed to obtain the desired effect. The special characters are as follows...

Character | List item type
--- | ---
* | Unordered List (bullet points)
# | Ordered List (1,2,3 etc)
: | Definition list, definition
; | Definition list, text

### Inline formatting

Inline formmating allows part of a line to be marked as having a particular style. The special characters used can appear anywhere on a line, but note that the formatting cannot cross lines. Codes are as follows...

Example | Example | Formatting
--- | --- | ---
*hello world* | hello world | Strong or Bold
/hello world/ | hello world | Emphasis or Italics
+hello world+ | hello world | Inserted text
-hello world- | hello world | Deleted or Strikethrough
hello ~world~ | hello world | Subscript
hello ^world^ | hello world | Superscript
"hello world" | hello world | Quoted
%hello world% | `hello world` | Code or Monospaced
@hello world@ | hello world | Cite

### Acronyms

Acronym tagging is acheived by placing the acronym in capital letters followed by the description is parenthesis. There must be no space between the acronym and the parenthesis. Example...

HTML(Hypertext Markup Language)
HTML

### Hyper Links

Links can be placed in the text and are followed (with no spaces) by the text to be displayed in brackets. Example: http://www.google.com/(Search Now) will be converted to Search Now.

### Moodle Module Links

If you know the Moodle id number (look for ?id=nn at the end of a module address) and the module name, you can link directly to that resource using the syntax:

ModuleName:nn(Description Text)

eg, resource:36(My New Page) forum:10(Jump to forum)

### Automatic reformating

Many commonly used functions are converted into their XHTML equivalents automatically.. The main ones are as follows...

- HTTP links are converted into active links
- ..., (R), (TM), (C), 1/4, 1/2, 3/4 are all converted to the correct character
- digits x digits converts to correct multiply symbol
- A line starting with at least four dashes is converted into a horizontal line