• UnicodeCharacters

• Do not indent paragraphs.
• Words wrap to window width and fill as needed. (Emphasis fails to work if you insert end of line by hand!)
• Use blank lines as separators.

• Four or more hyphens (----) at the beginning of a line make a horizontal rule.

• asterisk in column one for bullet item
  • up to four asterisks for deeper indenting
    • old format using tabs and numbered lists (lines starting with <tab(s)>number) discouraged

• Indent with one or more spaces to use a monospace font:

 This is text in a monospaced font.
   This is indented with three spaces.

• tab space colon tab -- often used (with emphasis) for quotations. (See SimulatingQuoteBlocks)

This is quoted. (When a quoted line wraps, it too is indented maintaining an indented block.) If the text continues for a bit then the feature will be demonstrated nicely. You will see that each successive line is indented.

• If you are going to ConvertSpacesToTabs, you need to type nine spaces, a colon, and then three spaces before the text. (See SimulatingQuoteBlocks.)

• tab Gnu colon tab -- and then the definition. This looks like this:

Gnu

A furry animal.

Gnu

A furry animal.

• Use doubled single-quotes for emphasis (usually italics)
• Use tripled single-quotes for strong emphasis (usually bold)
• Use five single-quotes, or triples within doubles, for some other kind of emphasis (Bold Italic), but be careful about the bugs in the Wiki emphasis logic... (for example, text within doubled single-quotes followed immediately by text within tripled single-quotes is processed incorrectly)doubletriple Q:has this bug been fixed? No, but the overlapped tags produced are accepted by some browsers.
• Emphasis can be used multiple times within a line, but cannot span across line boundaries
• Is there a simple way to do strike-throughs? perhaps ---three hyphens before and after--- ala ' ' ' for bold? [MichaelMuller 9/22/2004]

• JoinCapitalizedWords to make links to Wiki pages.
• Use SixSingleQuotes to AvoidMakingLinksToWikiName, or to separate suffixes (like 's') from WikiNames. Put the six quotes between the first capitalized letter and the rest of the NonWikiName (for example NonWikiName equals Non ' ' ' ' ' ' WikiName), or between the WikiName and the suffix.
• Precede URLs with "http:", "ftp:", "gopher:", "mailto:", or "news:" to create links automatically as in: http://www.c2.com/. For a url containing an apostrophe, use %27 instead of the apostrophe.
• URLs ending with .gif, .jpg, .jpeg or .png are inlined. (URLs ending with .jpe should be handled the same way, but aren't.) Note This approach means that image URLs with query parameters will not render as an image unless you add an extra "dummy" parameter ending with .gif, .jpg, .jpeg or .png at the end. Thankfully the need for such tricks is rare.
• Links to books specified by ISBN are treated specially. E.g., ISBN 0-13-748310-4 links to a bookseller. (The pattern is: "ISBN", optional colon, space, ten digits with optional hyphens, the whole thing optionally in square brackets. The last digit can be an "X".) We are an AmazonAssociate. [Why aren't we using ISBN://012345789? We are - the "//" is implicit!]
• I S B N: 0123456789 becomes ISBN 0123456789
• [I S B N 0123456789] becomes ISBN 0123456789
• [I S B N: 123-456-789-X] becomes ISBN 123-456-789-X
• [1], [2], [3], [4] used to refer to remote links. This feature has been removed. See FixingLinks if you stumble across one of them.
• AnswerMe: Would it be possible to provide the same thing for other materials using ASIN instead of ISBN? -- AalbertTorsius [Linking to what? Amazon doesn't have many such materials.] [Just about anything that's not a book, right? Such as B000060PEU is http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000060PEU (a Wacom drawing tablet) - and amazon certainly sells a lot of things that aren't books.][This could also be useful to link to scientific papers online via http://dx.doi.org followed by a number such as 10.1038/1011 which provides a unique and stable link to the article (e.g. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/1011) and works for all publishers]
• WikiCase is needed to link to a single word [WikiSingleWordProblem]

• HTML tags don't work
• &, <, and > are themselves
• WhyDoesntWikiDoHtml?

• When a rule says "tab," it wants a tab character without extra spaces around it. See TipForTypingTab if you have trouble entering tabs.
• The actual TextFormattingRegularExpressions that implement these rules are available for those who can read them.
• I've been able to see what's going on by opening the edit window as a new window in the browser. That way, I can link (in my mind) the text formatting rules with what you finally get displayed. Not that the rules are difficult!
• Inserting lines with the LynxBrowser presents a special challenge. For help with that, see UsingWikiWithLynx.
• Use italics sparingly when possible, as it's harder to read (especially at low resolution) than non-italics.

• HTML
• Tables
• Headers
• Mathematical formula expansion
• Scripts
• Loops or other programmatic structures
• FreeLinks