Wiki Code Cookbook

Emphasis in Type

Sometimes you need your words to pop in order to place emphasis on them. For the most part, these tools should be used sparingly. After all, if everything is emphasized, nothing is. And your article looks like crap.

Essential/Non-essential headers

If you are writing a particularly long article and/or an article required for Basic NET training, you may want to indicate some sections as "essential" reading and other sections as "supplemental". This is not a trick with text so much as it's a very small table that sits at the top of a page section. For an example in context, see: Basic NET Class Goals.

NETwiki standard:

• "Essential" should be a single line table in "firebrick" red, spanning 25% of the page, white bold text.
• "Supplemental" should be a single line table in "gold", spanning 25% of the page, white bold text.

Section Importance: Essential

{|class="wikitable" style="width: 25%; "
|+
| style="background: firebrick; color: white" |'''Section Importance: Essential'''
|}

Section Importance: Supplemental

{| class="wikitable" style="width: 25%; 
|+
|style="background: gold; color: black"|'''Section Importance: Supplemental'''
|}

Simple yellow highlight on text

Wiki syntax comes with a simple and easy way to place a yellow highlight on selected text. Simply brace it inside the code you see below.

Example: The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

'''Example:''' <mark>The quick brown fox</mark> jumps over the lazy dog.

Elaborate text highlights

Highlighting text in a color other than yellow can be done, but it's a pain in the ass. Still, if you gotta have that je ne sais quoi, there is a way to do it by marking it up with a <span>. For example:

All PBEM employees must stop crying before returning to work.

<span style="background:black; color:white">'''All PBEM employees must stop crying before returning to work.'''</span>

For design reasons, you may want a space before or after the sentence that is the same color as the highlight so it doesn't look quite so cut off. That's an extra layer of code. The syntax will just cut off a blank space even if you have it inside the brackets. So instead, you have to have a symbol, like an asterisk, bookending your sentence that is the color of the background.

*All PBEM employees must stop crying before returning to work.*

<span style="background:black; color:black">*</span><span style="background:black; color:white">'''All PBEM employees must stop crying before returning to work.'''</span><span style="background:black; color:black">*</span>

In that example, I also made the text white. But naturally, you can change the color of the text and background to create all manner of page design monstrosity.