h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I have questions about text in GuideML that do not seemed to be hinted at anywhere in the network of pages on GuideML.

I would suggest that a page be set up to deal specifically with the different aspects of text, but that's just me.

These are my questions:
How do I change the font of the text?
How do I change the size of the text?
How do I change the color of the text?
Is there any convenient place (page) on the Guide that talks on about the different modifiers to text, such as underlining, italics, subscript, superscript, and the rest? (I knwo they're on the Guide, but I haven't seen them in one centralised location.)

I don't know enough HTML to bumble my way through guessing at text changes, but I want to add color and different text to my pages. I tried looking at the code for someone else's page, but unless I know what I'm looking for I get rather confused.

Oh yeah, and what's the bit for seeing someone's page in code? Is it "/TestUserPage123456"? I can't seem to remember, nor can I remember where I first found it...

Thanx much a bunch!

Changing font, colour and size of text are all accomplished using HTML's tag, which is not part of GuideML (and may potentially stop working at some future date, although best not to worry about that right now). The best place to learn about it would be in an HTML tutorial somewhere on the Internet - there are loads of them and many are excellent. However, I will attempt to give a brief summary.

Size:

Some text

This increases text size by a small amount.

Some more text

Increases text size by a larger amount. You can also use +3, +4 etc. To make text smaller, use -1, -2, -3 etc.

Colour:

This is fairly simple:
This text will be red
or perhaps
This text will be blue
or even
This text will be light grey

That last uses an RGB hex triplet instead of a named colour, allowing you to produce any of about 16.7 million colours which you fancy (it is worth noting that humans can't perceive the difference between a great many of these, and it's actually impossible to use a computer's display to reproduce some colours, the physical nature of the technology prevents it. Especially for some greens). Scary bit: this is constructed out of three bytes represented as hexadecimal values. The first two characters after the # represent a value for the red component of the colour (from 00 to FF), the second two are for green, and the third two are for blue. Thus #FFFFFF is white, and #000000 is black. Most modern image editors will provide some means for finding out the RGB triplet of a colour, usually using the colour picker tool

(okay, the scary bit's over now)
If you don't like the scary bit, use colour names instead. Not all possible colour names are supported by all browsers - I believe there are only about 20 which are standard - but most browsers that most people use support many more.

Font:

To change the actual font, use like this:

Some text

Where "Some Text" will appear in Verdana. If Verdana is not found on the user's system, the browser will attempt to render the text in Arial. If that fails, it falls back on Helvetica and finally to its default sans-serif font (which, on Windows, is fairly likely to be Arial, although it's highly unlikely the system would have failed to find Verdana in that case). Of course, this is most useful for fonts that aren't almost the same as h2g2's (which uses Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif if I recall correctly) so you might find something more useful like

Some text

to be generally better. Watch out for using highly unusual fonts, people have to have them installed on their computers in order to see them, they don't come with the web pages, so always use a list of font names to provide something for the browser to fall back on that hopefully looks better than what it would do by itself (and there's really little telling what that might be, but it'd probably end up as Times New Roman or Times or something like that - or maybe even Courier ).


Now, as for bold, italics etc... there is no underline tag in GuideML, although HTML's will work until HTML tags are disallowed when GuideML 1.0 is finalised (although when this will be is unknown). The GuideML Clinic should help you with reference - http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/GuideML-Clinic

To see other people's code (which is, IMO, the best way to learn it), use the following:

To see the code for article A123456:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/Test123456

There is a way to see the code for a user space as well, I think, but I can't remember what it is, so if you want to do that, scroll down to the bottom of the Space and find the user's Entry list. Find the one (which is always the last one on the list, you may have to go to the more Entries page to find it) that corresponds to the User Space, note down it's A number and then feed it into the Test script as above.

Anything else you want to know? Was that too scary?

Questions welcomed.

A few additions:

SIZE
There are seven sizes. Instead of + and -, you can use a fixed size, Big font

COLOURS
See http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A623242 for an overview of RGB codes.

The GuideML tags for bold and italic are and
The HTML tag for underline is

And while Test123456 checks the code for A123456, you are right that TestUserPage123456 checks the code for U123456!

Check out http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A664715

Btw. If you use colours, it's important that you remember to check the page in both skins. While some colours look good in Alabaster, they can be invisible in Goo and vice versa.

And colours are exactly the method used to make the Classic Goo fan club invisible to Alabaster users. They set the text to be white, and so it blends into Alabaster's background, but shows up superbly on the excellent Goo...

Mmm, Goo...

So all this time when there's a colour or a funky font or different size or whatever, it's done using the HTML tag for it?

Isn't there anything in GuideML that can be done for that (and hopefully will be when they start finalising it)? I know about the hex colours, and I know about Goo/Alabaster incompatibility with some colours....

Oh yeah, btw, where exactly *is* the Goo fan club? The more I see, the more I want to put up a link to it... (Does it *have* to be done in white?) I see the Guide in Goo, yet I can never find anyone who's got a link up on their page....

I say we move to indtroduce colours and the like to GuideML.

But thanks a much for your help, all of you! I'll see what I can work into my page... I hope the tag doesn't disappear completely...

At the moment it's all HTML, not GuideML.
It sounds like you could be interested in http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A665309, a Request for Comments on the Proposed Standard for GuideML 1.0

The Classic Goo Fan Club is at http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A362828

How can it be HTML when so many of the tags are not standard HTML? I thought it was more based on XML.....

Aw well. I hope it gets all good and figured out in v1.0 ....

Thanx for the links, btw.

It's not HTML at all, it's an implementation of XML that just happens to share some tags with HTML, and is for a vaguely similar purpose. It also shares the "H" bit, because GuideML has hyperlinking capablilities.

In 1.0 the proposal includes the delights of no random HTML tags allowed to be passed in, and nice named colours like "background" which translate through to the current skin's colours. Which is really groovy.

ok, so how do I get spaces in between the paragraphs as it won't let me do that. Also what are those and tags suppose to do?