Formatting

The formatting options are deliberately restricted to things that are semantically useful, not too distracting, and not too arty. Arty is good, but it discourages quick writing, so it doesn’t suit the purpose of this wiki. (See http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WhyDoesntWikiDoHtml for arguments about this sort of issue.)

Links

You can make a link to another page on this wiki by writing the page’s name in double brackets, like this: [Wombats](/Wombats.html) or [Cute Wombats](/Cute Wombats.html), which gives you Wombats or Cute Wombats respectively.

The only restriction on page names is that they can’t contain dots (periods, .), forward slashes (/), or double quotes (“).

You can make a link to any URL like this:

[http://xeny.net](/http://xeny.net.html)

which will give you

http://xeny.net

Character set

If your browser and operating system allow it, you can use any Unicode character, by typing it straight in or by copying and pasting it from somewhere.

Here are some example characters. How they look will depend on what fonts your browser is using. ☺ ☃ ☆ ❡ φ ∴ Ⅽ ↀ ↂ ⌘ ←→↑↓ ❈ ♪ ●

Paragraphs

Start a new paragraph by leaving a blank line.

Emphasis

You can emphasise text (which usually means putting them in bold or italics, but the details depend on the font) by surrounding it with asterisks (*). E.g., this input:

*single asterisks*

**double asterisks**

will produce:

single asterisks

double asterisks

Headings

To make a heading, use 1 to 6 hash characters at the start of the line. For example:

# This is a big header

## This is a smaller header

###### This is a much smaller header

Blockquotes

You can use email-style > characters for blockquoting. If you’re familiar with quoting passages of text in an email message, then you know how to create a blockquote.

Horizontal rules

You can produce a horizontal rule by placing three or more hyphens on a line by themselves, followed by a blank line.

“Code blocks”

Sometimes you want to preserve the indentation of some lines of text, and have characters which usually have special meanings to Bolzano treated as if they didn’t. This is especially useful for pasting in computer programs and poetry. Since programmers don’t often think about poetry, they call these things “code blocks”.

To produce a code block in Bolzano, indent every line of the block by at least 4 spaces or 1 tab. For example:

From great beginnings
    to the edge of the sea
    **my life and yours**
Mapped out like a cliché.

x := 6

To indicate a short span of code, wrap it with backtick quotes (” ` “). For example:

Use the `printf()` function.

will produce:

Use the printf() function.