Where is markup/formatting described?

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1

Where is the formatting help page?

I can see there are some clickety-click icons above where I’m typing right now, but I’d rather RTFM. There is some text that immediately disappears when you start typing, but I think it said something about HTML, some ??code, and something else I can’t see anymore now that I actually need it.

I’d prefer to use in-line HTML, and it sounds like this forum supports some subset of that. But, which tags? Surely the subset is small. I don’t really want to find the list by trial an error.

Here’s a test of using escape characters: <not-a-tag>

Earlier there was a preview to the right of where I’m typing this, but now there’s a blue box with mangled text.

Anyway, where do I RTFM?

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It is a variant of markdown. One asterisk * for italics. Two asterisks ** for bold. Two tildes ~~ for strikethrough etc.

A quick search found this link with more details

It should be on the FAQ or something here, but I think one of the official Admins has to do that.

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I found by experimentation that <i>…</i> works for italics, and <b>…</b> works for bold, but where are these and all the other supported tags documented? Your link only seems to point to this stuff called “markdown”, which I’m having a hard time understanding the purpose of if enough HTML works.

4

Markdown is the official way of formatting posts, both here on Discourse, and on Stack Exchange. Markdown supports HTML, rather than the other way round. It’s intended to be a more user-friendly way of formatting posts compared to HTML. Markdown also has more features available, as the thread that manassehkatz linked shows.

Supported tags: a, img, b, i, s, blockquote, ul, ol, li, pre, code, h1-6, table, tr, th, td at least - there may be more.

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Consider how easy typing *yes* is compared to <i>yes</i>.

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6

Not to mention that it was the way it was done all the way back to Usenet, when HTML wasn’t known yet, and all messages were pure ASCII, so the interpretation as emphasis had to be done by the readers themselves, instead of software.

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Copying from another topic to here, so it’s together with the rest of the markup information:

Put the quote end tag on its own line.

[quote]
Text[/quote]

gives:

[quote]
Text[/quote]

But

[quote]
Text
[/quote]

gives

On the blue box: You get that if the system thinks you’re writing something very similar to an existing topic (but in my experience it always matches completely unrelated stuff). Just click the X to make it go away.

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