Wiki Editing Tips
The following is a very quick overview of things that have been found to be useful when editing the libisis wiki particularly. See help for full information.
Good Examples
The following pages demonstrate most wiki styles that you might want to use
Homer Gui setup - use of thumbnails
User Manual - linking to titles
Plot Commands - tables, pictures, titles, bold / italics.
The Basics
Formatting
to make something italic, bold or both use two, three or five ' marks.
''italic'', '''bold''', '''''both'''''
to make something pre-formatted then use
<pre> pre-formatted text
to give
pre-formatted text
This is good for chunks of code. Wiki markup doesn't work, so you can use square brakets etc. without worrying about the wiki markup. If you want wiki markup to work within the pre-formatted text then use two spaces before each line instead
wiki formatting like IXTdataset_1d still works if you use a space (see the code for this page to see the spaces)
Links
Links are made using square brakets
[[page name]]
If you want to display different text to the page name then use a pipe
[[page name|displayed text]]
Headings
==Heading1==, ===Heading2===, ====Heading3====
These are the three levels of headings you should use, They appear in the contents so Don't use them just to make text larger!
White Space
A new line in the editor does not mean a new line in the finished article. Always leave two blank lines between the end of one section and the start of another - it spreads everything out and looks much much better.
- Leave a blank space if you want a new line. Leave TWO if you actually want a blank space. The first new line is always ignored.
Templates
If there is a specific piece of text that you use a lot and could change, then put it in a template. These are just like normal pages, except you name them "template:page_name". This can be any bit of text. For instance, one use might be that you want all displays of code to look the same. Create a template that has the HTML code for the font (for instance color="blue" fontsize="11") and store it on the page
template:code text
To include a template on a page, simply enclose the page name in double curly brackets. Now whenever you have a piece of code that you want formatted with the template you type
<font {{code_text}}> some text here </font>
This is used to format all the tables (for instance look at the code for IXTdataset_2d). When you change the template, you also change everything that uses the template. It is much easier to manage!
Inset Pages
Exactly the same as including templates, you can include pages from the wiki. For examples of both see the code for Tutorial, Homer information has been added from another page and the "tasks" are all in the same font that can be changed if I want to. When including pages a colon is used before the page name, so
{{:IXTdataset_2d}}
will inset the IXTdataset_2d page.
Linking To Headings
If a page has headings, then you can link to them as if they were bookmarks using the syntax
[[page name#Heading Name]] [[page name#Heading Name|displayed text]]
See the User Manual for a very good example of using this!
Finding Pages That Need to be Created
A list of links to pages that do not currently exist can be found by going to special pages (on the left hand pane) and then "wanted pages". Click the red links to make pages, or click the blue ('links') next to them to see the pages where the links exist. This is useful for working out what pages are needed but also to find spelling mistakes in links and correcting them.
Images
Images can be added by clicking the upload file link on the left hand pane. Upload the image. Remember that the wiki will be CaSe sensitive - it is a bad idea to use capital letters. Then where you want the image to appear, use the syntax
[[image:filename.jpg|300px|caption]]
300px relates to the size of the image. Aspect ratio is maintained. 300px is about right for most images, 500px might be used. filename.jpg is the name of the file you uploaded, caption will appear when the mouse is held over the image, or if the image can't be loaded (due to browser difficulties, personal preference settings etc.) .
Plot Commands gives good examples of how to use images.
Using HTML
You can use HTML tags to format text. An opening tag and closing tag are used <tag> </tag> anything inbetween <tag> and </tag> will have the properties given by tag. The most useful tags are
<tt>good for code segments</tt> <center> to center text in the window. </center> <nowiki> things between these tags are not '''subjected''' to [[wiki formatting]] </nowiki>
this will display:
good for code segments
things between these tags are not '''subjected''' to [[wiki formatting]]