Help:Formatting

From Gospel Translations

Revision as of 20:31, 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.

Making References

Very often authors will cite others, and the software we use to run this site makes handling those easy. The system only requires that you place the actual reference within <ref> and </ref> tags, and that you include the code

== References == 

at the bottom of the article, chapter, or other text you are translating. So for example, if your text includes the lines,

"Then must you speak
Of One that lov'd not wisely but too well."2

and footnote 2 is marked

Shakespeare, William. Othello (V, ii, 343-344).

you would format your reference as follows:

"Then must you speak
Of One that lov'd not wisely but too well."<ref>Shakespeare, William. Othello (V, ii, 343-344).</ref>

Then when you insert

== References == <references />

at the end of your article, the website will automatically generate a numbered footnote list for you, as below:

1. Shakespeare, William. Othello (V, ii, 343-344).

Bold, Italics, Etc.

Text formatting is usually applied by adding simple markup, known as wikitext, to your text. This table shows you what to type to get your desired results. Until we develop our own guide here, you'll be most helped by the cheat sheet at Wikipedia.

Creating Tables

You can use standard HTML code to make tables, or you can use special wikitext markup to do so. Again, the guide at Wikipedia will serve as your best reference until we are able to develop our own here!

Creating Links

Although hyperlinks will be rare in any of the translations we produce, there will be times when book summary pages, the Help section, or other areas of the site will need to make use of them. The list below gives some basic guidance which should suffice.

• Make a link to the page called Sandbox by typing [[Sandbox]]. Result: Sandbox
• Name a link to the page called Sandbox "The Sandbox" by typing [[Sandbox|The Sandbox]]. Result: The Sandbox
• Make a link to Google (or any other external site) by typing http://www.google.com: Result: http://www.google.com
• Name a link to Google "Search the web" by typing by typing [http://www.google.com Search the web]: Result: Search the web