Basic text formatting

Try out all these techniques below in the playground.

The first five items on the left of the edit window toolbar offer you basic text formatting. You can either click on the relevant place, where

• B gives Bold Text
• I gives Italic Text
• U gives Underlined Text
• T gives Monospaced Text
• T gives Strike-through Text

Further along the toolbar

• — gives a horizonal rule: but you must leave a blank line before it.

Alternatively, you can write text first, then make it e.g. bold by highlighting it (double click on one word; or drag across more than one word) and when it is highlighted, click on the relevant place in the toolbar.

• **Bold Text** gives Bold Text
• //Italic Text// gives Italic Text
• **//Bold-Italic Text//** gives Bold-Italic Text
• __Underlined Text__ gives Underlined Text (note the double underscores)
• ''Monospaced Text'' gives Monospaced Text
• <del>Strike-through Text</del> gives Strike-through Text
• text with<sup>superscript</sup> gives text with^superscript
• text with<sub>subscript</sub> gives text with_subscript
• ---- creates a “horizontal rule”: remember the need for a blank line before it.

• *Italic Text* works: gives Italic Text
• _Italic Text_ with one underscore each side, not two works: also gives Italic Text
• **Bold Text** is the same as DokuWiki
• ''Monospaced Text'' is the same as DokuWiki
• ---- for a horizontal rule is the same as DokuWiki
• __Not Bold but Underlined__ works as DokuWiki, not bold as in Markdown
• ***Bold-Italic Text*** just messes things up, don't try it!
• ~~attempted strikethrough~~ does not work, use <del> as above
• H~2~O and x^2^ do not work – H~2~O and x^2^ – use <sub> and <sup> as above

Because Markdown uses ---- underneath text to indicate a level-2 heading, you must leave a space before a horizontal rule.

As the characters above are used to indicate formatting, if you want to use the characters themselves on your page you may need to consider how to do it.

The easiest way to be sure is to contain things you want unchanged inside <nowiki> </nowiki>tags.

<nowiki>''**__I want to see all the formatting characters__**''</nowiki>
comes out as
''**__I want to see all the formatting characters__**''

On this page, the 'backtick' character ` is used in all the examples above, to allow showing the markup. But as you see, it does more than simply disable the special characters, as <nowiki> does: it also makes them monospaced and red text on pink background.

If you use the backtick, be very careful to have them balanced. Otherwise you might get a surprise when you look at the result!

MediaWiki syntax for these is almost all different. See MediaWiki and DokuWiki.

However, <sup> and <sub> are the same; <nowiki> too!