The text in Articles, News and Discussion
Sections can be embellished by coloured text,
bold or italic. Photos can also be displayed and Links
to other places on the Internet can also be posted. Also tiny icons
for smiles, sadness etc can be inserted to indicate mood, especially
in Discussion.
Other than those icons, the markup
is done by tags which come in pairs; a start tag and an end tag. They
are similar in nature to HTML tags; they surround the text to be embellished.
The markup tags must be typed in lower-case; each includes an open-square-bracket
and close-square-bracket which you must include in your typing. Tags
can be combined, e.g. to produce coloured italic titles, see examples
below.
Text Markup
| [h1] …. [/h1] |
Biggest Title
|
| [h2] …. [/h2] |
Second Biggest Title
|
| [h3] …. [/h3] |
Third Biggest Title
|
| [b] …. [/b] |
Bold Text |
| [i] …. [/i] |
Italic text |
| [c] … [/c] |
Centralise the text
|
| [right] ... [/right] |
Align text to the right side
Also used to put a [mag] on the right (see below)
|
| [red] … [/red] |
Red
coloured text |
| [blue] … [/blue] |
Blue
coloured text |
| [green] … [/green] |
Green
coloured text |
| [quote] … [/quote] |
Denote quotation from
other publication |
| [code] … [/code] |
Exact fixed-width font
layout
useful for tabular text.
|
Icons
| [:)] |
Smile  |
| [:P] |
Tongue stuck-out  |
| [:(] |
Sad  |
| [;)] |
Wink  |
Special
| [a] … [/a] |
The text between these
two tags is converted to a hypertext link. It appears as the word
link (underlined). The Internet
address between the two tags can be a full address, i.e.
beginning with “http://”, or relative to the website. |
| [img] … [/img] |
 The
text between these two tags should be an address of a picture,
generally in the form “/support/photos/filename.jpg”, but it can be a
full Internet address if the photo is on a web-site other than
this one.The picture will be displayed on the right of
the body text. |
| [imgl] … [/imgl] |
The
text between these two tags should be an address of a picture,
generally in the form “/support/photos/filename.jpg”, but it can be a
full Internet address if the photo is on a web-site other than
this one. The picture will be displayed on the left of
the body text. |
| [mag] ... [/mag] |
The text between these
two tags should be an address of a picture, generally in the form
“/support/photos/filename.jpg”, but it can be a full Internet address
if the photo is on a web-site other than this one. This
will usually be an enlarged version of a photo near this tag pair.
This pair displays an icon of a magnifiying glass 
which when clicked, displays the larger picture. |
| [br][/br] |
Break the text clear of any photos. i.e. ensure that following
text is below the photos. |
Paired tags must always have both
present and must be nested properly. That means that tag pairs cannot
overlap each other. This is easier to illustrate by example.
To make a title, say “Cheeky Chappies”
into a big headline, you type
[h1]Cheeky Chappies[/h1]
to also make it blue you add the tags for blue text around the whole
thing, i.e.
[blue][h1]Cheeky
Chappies[/h1][/blue]
or you can do:
[h1][blue]Cheeky
Chappies[/blue][/h1]
but you must not do:
[h1][blue]Cheeky
Chappies[/h1][/blue]
or
[blue][h1]Cheeky Chappies[/blue][/h1]
The exact effect of each of the markup
tags depends on which browser program the reader is using. When you
proof-read your articles, you should at minimum try them at several
different setting of the Font-Size button of your browser and if practical
you should proof-read under both Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer
in turn.
