As explained in the chapter Wiki, the wiki syntax tries to make it easy to format texts by using simple, purely textual markup. The following is a complete list of the wiki markup elements supported by MoStacks.
MoStacks implements a subset of Creole 1.0, as defined on the WikiCreole website. (WikiCreole is an attempt at standardizing wiki markup elements; the half dozen or so wiki engines currently in wider use on the Internet all use slightly different markup elements.)
The following table gives a short markup overview; details follow after the table:
| Source Text with Markup | Resulting Formatted Text |
|
Empty lines separate paragraphs. This is a second paragraph. |
Empty lines separate paragraphs. This is a second paragraph. |
|
Single line breaks in source text are ignored. |
Single line breaks in source text are ignored. |
| forced\\line break | forced line break |
| [[Link]] | Link |
| [[Link target|Different link text]] | Different link text |
| **bold** | bold |
| //italics// | italics |
| __underline__ | underline |
Paragraphs
Wikis see text as a sequence of paragraphs. Lines in paragraphs are formatted dynamically, with linke breaks inserted according to the available total for the paragraph text.
A single line break in the source text is ignored, or more exactly replaced with a single blank. A separate blank line is needed to form paragraphs, i.e. ending a paragraph and starting the following.
(This is a sometimes hotly debated issue, and many people say they would prefer a system which respects and preserves source text line breaks, all of them. However, the WikiCreole people decided to side with nearly all the existing wikis, not to say with other important markup languages like HTML.)
Forced Linke Breaks
At any point, you can use the two-character sequence \\ to force a line break. An additional source text line break immediately behind \\ is ignored.
Links
Links are probably the most useful and most powerful feature of the MoStacks wiki engine. A link "links" to another card: If you tap on a link the view switches to the card whose name is given in the link. If no card with such a name can be found an error message is displayed. If card names are not unique MoStacks displays the first card with the given name (first according to the order of the cards in the stack).
Links start with [[ and end with ]]. You can see in the markup overview above that a link can contain a target or a target and a link text. With the second variant, only the link text is displayed; the target will not be visible. Target and link text are separated by a vertical bar |. The two are completely independent.
There are also a number of special "link" types, described in the chapter Special Links, that e.g. allow you do start a voice or a new SMS by tapping a link in a wiki field.
Bold, Italics, Underline
These three ways to format text work in an indentical way: The text to format is surrounded by corresponding marks, ** for bold, // for italics, and __ (two "underscore" characters) for underline.
The three formattings can be combined; e.g. **//sample//** gives bold and italics, like this sample. If you do not open and close the formatting marks in the proper order, the result can be hard to predict; the MoStacks wiki engine is not very robust in this respect.
Formatting can span several source text lines, but stops at the end of a paragraph at the latest, automatically i.e. even with the closing mark missing.