Text plays a major role in any online site and the ability to quickly and easily format text is essential. This tutorial explains how to perform basic text formatting...
Bold and Italic Text
Bold and Italic text should be used to highlight important information within your content:
Normal text, *bold text* and _italic text_.
Result: Normal text, bold text and italic text.
Deleted and Inserted Text
If you want to show revisions on-screen, then using deleted and inserted text is an ideal way to show where changes have been made:
Normal text, +inserted text+ and -deleted text-.
Result: Normal text, inserted text and deleted text.
See Also: strike macro
Superscript and Subscript Text
Superscript and subscript text is useful for various forms of documentation, such as chemical or mathematical forumulas, etc:
Normal text, ^superscript text^ and ~subscript text~.
Result: Normal text, superscript text and subscript text.
Citation
Citations are useful when you wish to display quotes from other people or publications:
Normal text, ??citation text??.
Result: Normal text, citation text.
Monospaced / Typewriter Text
Monospaced text is useful for displaying sections of computer code or other information that benefits from being displayed in a fixed-width font:
Normal text iii, {{monspaced text iii}}.
Result: Normal text iii, monspaced text iii.
See Also: noformat macro and code macro
Escaping Characters
There will be times when you want a character to be displayed, but it is mistaken for a text formatting character. For example, you want to show the question "How do I do XYZ?" as a citation:
??How do I do XYZ???
This would display as: How do I do XYZ?
As you can see, your question mark is appearing outside the quotes. To get round this problem, simply place a backslash character before your question mark (this process is known in techie-land as "escaping"):
??How do I do XYZ\???
This would display as: How do I do XYZ?
Hints and Tips
Use text formatting sparingly so that when it is used, it stands out more and is therefore more effective.
Text formatting can help text-to-speech software read your web pages in a more informative way.
Frequently Asked Questions
| Q | How do I change the text colour and background colour? |
|---|---|
| A | By using the color macro, bgcolor macro and highlight macro. |
| Q | How do I add headings? |
|---|---|
| A | See our tutorial on Headings |
| Q | How do I do lists and indents? |
|---|---|
| A | See our tutorial on Lists and Indents |
| Q | How do I change the font? |
|---|---|
| A | If you are using the Builder theme, you can edit the CSS Custom Styles. |
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Comments (4)
Oct 12, 2006
Anonymous says:
How do i change the size of text, i.e. i want to make a page smaller so when pri...How do i change the size of text, i.e. i want to make a page smaller so when printed, i can make it fit on one page
Oct 12, 2006
Guy Fraser says:
Use the style macro to inject custom CSS in to the page where you want to apply ...Use the style macro to inject custom CSS in to the page where you want to apply text size changes. Alternatively, use our [Builder theme] which allows CSS to be applied to entire spaces.
Nov 01, 2006
Anonymous says:
Escaping curley braces Take a look at this. Type: \{\{example \}\} and yo...Escaping curley braces
Take a look at this. Type:
\{\{example \}\}and you get:
{{example }}
That's expected behavior, perfectly OK. But remove a trailing space after the word 'example':
\{\{example\}\}...and escaping does not work. I have expected to see:
{{example}}but I get:
example
What should I type to get two backslashes in the middle of the sentence?
Nov 01, 2006
Dan Hardiker says:
Check the confluence mailing list, I think the example is to use browser escape ...Check the confluence mailing list, I think the example is to use browser escape sequences (like for a non-breaking space or " for a quotation mark).
This is an issue with the Confluence renderer and will need to be taken up with Atlassian directly.