Demonstration of Wiki formatting

Styles and Effects

There are a number of effects to use on ordinary text:

• We can use italic text, which is written between pairs of apostrophes: ''italic'' becomes italic.
• There is also bold text, which is written between groups of three apostrophes: '''bold''' becomes bold.
• A combination of the two can be achieved by using five apostrophes: '''''bold and italic''''' becomes bold and italic.
• Monospaced text is written between backticks: `code` becomes code.
• Underlined text is surrounded on each side by two underscores: __underlined__ becomes underlined.

List items

List items appear lines which begin with the * character. There needs to be a space before the item text, otherwise it will be treated as part of the item's format string. For example:

• This item began with * and was immediately followed by a space.
• The next item contains the text "*Different_list: This mistake was intentional.":

• Different_list: This mistake was intentional.

In the above items, the * character in the body of each item was written directly but, at the beginning of a line, you need to use \* to avoid the * character being used to create a list element. Note also that:

• The \ character which was itself written using the \\ sequence of characters.
• Deeper levels of nesting can be created by using multiple * characters:
  • This element was generated using the string **, for example.
  • . This element used *.* which was naughty because the decimal point is redundant and should really only be used in enumerated lists.

Enumerated lists can take the form of ordinary sequences of numbered items:

• 1. This item began with the #. string.
• 2. To write # at the start of a line, you would use \# to avoid the # being treated as a list item.
• 3. The decimal point following the # character indicates that this index in the list item will be followed by a decimal point.
  • 3.1. When inserted between # characters, the decimal point appears as in this item.
  • 3.1 The lack of a trailing decimal point is not a problem.

Various formatting characters can also be used:

• a) Lower case letters are entered using the @ character.
• b) In this case we have used the @) format string.

• 1A) Upper case letters are entered using the $ character.
• 1B) Changing the list format string causes a new list to be created.

Preformatted text

To switch off formatting and display text in a monospaced font, we precede text by a group of three opening braces at the beginning of a line and follow it by a corresponding group of three closing braces at the beginning of a line.

For example, the text

{{{def greeting():
 
    print "Hello!"
}}}

will produce the following result:

def greeting():

    print "Hello!"

Opening and closing braces can be included within preformatted areas but care must be taken to avoid placing three of either at the beginning of a line.