Help:Formatting

From Gospel Translations

Revision as of 18:15, 29 August 2007

Objectives

There are two objectives to keep in mind when making formatting decisions:

1. Making the text readable and attractive
2. Conforming to the look-and-feel of the original text

If you're ever unsure of how to format a page, check out the work already done by others by browsing the library, ask questions of other editors, and then just try something. If someone wants to improve on it, they will!

Templates

To help you with formatting, we have already developed several templates that take care of basic functions:

• LeftInsert to place call-out boxes on the left
• RightInsert to place call-out boxes on the right
• InfoBar to provide basic information about a resource on the top of each page

We recommend that you begin by reading the tutorial on templates hosted at http://www.MediaWiki.org. That will give you a basic understanding of how templates work and you will be able to make your own for the whole community to use. For more immediate help, here is the code that you would insert in a page to use these templates.

To put text on the right or left in a call-out box, use:

{{RightInsert|This text will appear on the right in a gray box}}
{{LeftInsert|This text will appear on the left in a gray box}}

You will want to insert those codes at the beginning of the line on which you want the box to start. They are preformatted to only take up 20% of the available width of the page, so you don't need to worry about them getting to large. Just place the code immediately before the content that it should be lined up with, and it will automatically take up the right size and shape. So for example, in order to get the box at right to line up as it did, the source of this page reads:

{{RighttInsert|This is lined up with the start of the paragraph at left.}} You will want to insert those codes at...

You may notice that the call-out box appears to actually be a few pixels lower than the line of text to its left. This is because of automatic spacing around it to keep it from running into any text above, adjacent to, or beneath it.

To insert the information bar, use:

{{InfoBar
|author=The name of the author or authors
|editor=The name of the editor or editors
|partner=The ministry or publisher that lent this resource to our library
|partnerurl=The web address for the ministry or publisher's homepage, beginning with http://
|other=Any additional info about the text, i.e., "This article originally appeared in XYZ Magazine." Leave blank if desired.
}}

For an example of how that looks, look at an article and you will get the idea.