There seems
not to be any posting on CathInfo that gives an overview of the formatting for its own postings, including follow-ups. So aside from Matthew, my background qualifies me plenty well enough to be the one here to take an initial whack at it.
It's based on a formatting language called
BB-Code (
BB for
Bulletin
Board: the term that prevailed in those bygone years when access was via dial-up modems). The formatting codes are typed within syntactic constructs termed
tags, which are
delimited by the bracket symbols ("
[" and "
]")
- , and are typically used in pairs that enclose text to be specially formatted or otherwise processed, with the minor asymmetry that the closing tag is distinguished by also having a forward-slash ("/") immediately before the first letter inside its brackets. The simple paired tags that've shown that they work as expected (by me) include:
[b] and [/b]: bold-face text.
[i] and [/i]: italic or oblique text (e.g.: book or periodical titles).
[s] and [/s]: struck-through (i.e.: horizontally lined-through) text.
[u] and [/u]: underlined text (please use sparingly if at all; a computer is not a typewriter--use italics instead--and this being the default formatting for links in the same browsers that are used to read CathInfo, gratuitous underlining confuses readers).
This information on inferred formatting is known by its author to be incomplete, especially because it runs on the MercuryBoard software, which Matthew has customized to meet his own needs and preferences. And also because I've omitted some, to be presented in follow-up postings (e.g.: the image tag, whose exact format I don't recall right now). But maybe this thread will be worth pinning, regardless of incompleteness.
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Note *: In general, follow-up postings in this thread (or other threads that describe the formatting syntax) may need to expect to create visible brackets ("[" and "]") by using the ASCII/ISO decimal codes (91 and 93) for those symbols, in what are called HTML entities. Those entities have 3 parts, with no blanks allowed between them: they begin with an ampersand and an immediately following sharp-sign (called the "pound-sign"by United-Statesians), thus ("&#"), have the symbol number (expressed in decimal) in the middle, and end with a semicolon (";").