Help:Advanced text formatting

Changing font faces

See also: Wikipedia:Typography

The MediaWiki markup language supports many HTML tags, including <span style="font-family:Garamond;"> and such. Some of the fonts are:

• Garamond: This is Garamond font.
• Georgia:     This is Georgia font.
• Courier:     This is Courier font.
• Helvetica:   This is Helvetica font.
• Times Roman: This is Times Roman font.
• Arial:       This is Arial font (default).
• Linux Libertine:   This is Linux Libertine.
• Georgia:     This is Georgia font.

Changing font color or span style=color

See also: Help:Using colours

The MediaWiki markup language supports HTML-style color tags, to change the color of text, such as "<span style="color:gray;">xx</span>". Templates like {{color}} also exist to change text color.

To change text colors, some colors are (or see all: Web colors):

• Darkgreen: This is "darkgreen" font color.
• Darkred & crimson: This is "darkred" font color and "crimson" here.
• Blue: This is "blue" font color and "darkblue" here.
• Darkorange: This is darkorange font color.
• Chocolate & SaddleBrown: This is "chocolate" font color and "SaddleBrown" here.
• Gray: This is "gray" font color and "darkgray" here.
• #515151: Using <span style="color:#515151;"> here.

The default color is black (or hex-code #000000). When changing the text color, care must be taken to put the "/" in the end tag, such as "</span>" to reset text color afterward. For an extensive list of hundreds of screen colors, see: Web colors.

Undenting/bracketing of text

Real typesetting software,typically has had simple directives to trigger alignments as left, right, center, or undented (beyond the left-margin line). However, for decades, HTML has had only limited options for easy alignment (one: <center>). A method for undenting the first word of a paragraph is to put the paragraph into a text-table, where the first word (or syllable) is (alone) in column 1, while the other text is in column 2. For example, undenting "Beethoven":

Markup	<table cellspacing=0 cellpadding=0><tr><td valign=top>Bee<td>thoven                 composed [[Moonlight Sonata]] while he was losing his hearing.</table>
Renders as	Bee thoven composed Moonlight Sonata while he was losing his hearing.

Note the use of both "cellspacing=0 cellpadding=0" so as to not separate the spacing between the first syllable "Bee" and "thoven".

A third column can be used to enclose text in outside brackets, then putting the closing-bracket "]" in column 3, as follows:

Markup	<table><tr><td valign=top>[<td>This is line 1.<br>Line 2.<td>]</table>
Renders as	[ This is line 1. Line 2. ]

The original design of the HTML language included presentational markup, such as the <center> tag. However, this type of presentational markup tags has been deprecated in current HTML and XHTML recommendations and is illegal in HTML5. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) have been encouraged by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for presentational markup and other styling.

See also

WP:Advanced article editing WP:Advanced footnote formatting WP:Advanced table formatting WP:Alert WP:Thinking outside the infobox

WP:About translating German Wikipedia WP:Pruning article revisions WP:Overlink crisis WP:Authors of Wikipedia WP:Avoiding difficult users

Notes

^[a] - The lyrics are truncated, to keep them short, per copyright restrictions limiting display to 10%, or prohibiting the display of an entire performable unit, of a composition.

[ This essay is a draft to be expanded, later... ]