DevonMcCormick/WikiTips

Here is a quick reference to some common formatting you might want to do on a wiki page.

Adding "@SIG@" to a note will append your signature - see following - along with the date and time but this signature will not display when you preview the page.

-- DevonMcCormick 2010-02-17 19:46:18

Otherwise, here are some pitfalls I've encountered working on wiki pages and tips for dealing with them as well as other tips.

General Tips

What I usually do is examine the source of a page that looks like what I want to accomplish. However, there are a few pitfalls I can warn you about.

1) Uploaded files, like the .jpg file showing the APL code on the Diophantine page, have case-sensitive names and insist on a lower-case suffix like "jpg".

Also, the wiki fails silently for files with underscores in the name, like this: seemingly_ordinary_file.txt.

Also, consider saving images, like graphs you generate in the J-language, as Portable Network Graphics or ".png" files as these are sometimes more efficient than .jpgs. Take a look at the J-language code at the top of this picture, which is the same as the "miscellaneous picture" linked to below, for an example of saving a picture in this format.

2) There is a wiki command "<<TableOfContents>>" I find useful: it makes a table of contents from all your section headings. Take a look at the source to see how this works.

Major section titles are marked by double =s and minor ones by triple =s like this:

== Major ==
=== Minor ===

3) Of course, you need to register to be able to edit pages. The wiki wants you to use a "camel-case" name like "DevonMcCormick" and this can be used as a sub-directory name to group your own pages. You create a new page simply by entering it into your browser's address bar once you've registered, like this: http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/DevonMcCormick/WikiTips.

4) Link to another page on the J-Wiki like this:

[[NYCJUG/linearDiophantineEquations|Diophantine equations]]

This will prefix "NYCJUG" with the current high-level URL "http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki" and will make the text after the "pipe" a blue link as seen in the reference to "linearDiophantineEquations" above.

The same applies when linking to any URL in general like this:

[[http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/Essays/Text_Formatting|essay]]

will display the single word in brackets after the pipe, "essay" in this case, instead of the text of the link, like so. In general, you can represent a link by a "blue" word by bracketing the wiki command with a word or phrase following it, separated by a pipe, e.g.

[[attachment:miscPic.jpg|miscellanous picture]]

looks like this: miscellanous picture.

Note that this method used with a picture makes it a link on which one must click rather than showing it in-line, using syntax like the following (be sure not to put a space between the colon and the file name):

{{attachment:sineEyesWBrows_66.jpg}}

like this .

5) Enter code or anything else you want to see "as is", like the wiki markup above, by enclosing it in triple curlies (curly braces, i.e. "{" and "}"), like this:

{{{
NB.* MyStrings.ijs: (text) string handling fns.

tc =: # (i.~{.]) [: }. (,#) {~^:a: 0:

NB.* lineNoWiderThan: Given: a string of words separated by blanks and a positive integer w of the desired width. Replace appropriate blanks in the string by the newline character LF , so that lines are no wider than w and each line contains all the words that fit within the line.

NB. This is a renamed "fmt" function from an essay on text formatting by
NB. Roger Hui, at http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/Essays/Text_Formatting.
lineNoWiderThan=: 4 : 0
 e=. (' ' I.@:= y),#y
 LF (e {~ <: tc e I. (x+2)+}:_1,e)} y
)

end =: #@] ,~ ' ' I.@:= ]
candidates =: ] I. 2&+@[ + }:@(_1&,)@]
ix =: [ (<:@tc@candidates { ]) end
NB.* lineNoWiderThant: tacit version of "lineNoWiderThan".
lineNoWiderThant =: LF"_`ix`]
}}} 

A change in the Wiki format now messes up in-line triple-curlies, so an expression starting like this

{{{diag0=: (<0 1)&|:     NB. diagonal of matrix
}}}

no longer works properly. You have to add a line break after the opening triple-curly like this:

{{{
diag0=: (<0 1)&|:     NB. diagonal of matrix
}}}

to fix it.

6) Use the "Preview" button early and often.

7) To help people to find your page, you may want to include a list of keywords that you think likely to be used as search phrases to locate your topic. So, for this page, I put this

#pragma keywords hints, editing gotchas, adumbration, tip-off, warning, observation, wrinkle

at the top as the comma-separated list after "keywords" are relevant phrases which may not otherwise appear in the text.

Sometimes we use unusual, mathematics-based, terminology in the J-language world so adding likely synonyms can help people discover what we mean. Also, since anyone can edit these pages, other people can add keywords which seem natural to them but which you may not have considered.

8) You can establish an anchor-point in the middle of a page to allow references directly to a sub-section:

<<Anchor(anchorExample)>>

and link to it like this:

[[DevonMcCormick/WikiTips#anchorExample]]

• the <<Anchor>> is not necessary to jump to sections, their anchors are automatically generated with heading name as in [[HelpOnLinking#Anchors]] to jump to "Anchors" section. -- OlegKobchenko 2009-09-24 01:08:27

• However, <<Anchor>> is useful for jumping to a point within a section, as shown in the following example. -- DevonMcCormick 2010-01-16 19:34:00

This links to the bottom of my test page.

You have to save the page in order to test linking to the anchor.

9) You can insert a table

like this:

||'''Date'''||'''Page'''||'''Change'''||
||20090907||[[DevonMcCormick/WikiTips|WikiTips]]||Added examples of anchors and tables||
||20090903||NYCJUG/2009-08-11||Updated "Terser Is Better" essay||

CategoryWorkInProgress