Document Production

(let's collect useful information about how we're producing documents here!)

Editing and Firefox

Editing pages in the Wiki can interact badly with Firefox, resulting in tabs that refresh forever (but fortunately in some sort of wait state) and can't even be closed. To reduce the probability of this bad interaction, always leave the editing page as the current page in a tab and either finish or cancel the edit as soon as possible.

Macros (known as Templates in Wiki-speak)

When you edit a document you will things in double braces, like {{TR|title=Structural Specification and Functional-Style Syntax}} or {{Review|[[User:IanHorrocks|IanHorrocks]] ... }}. These are template calls.

The template definition is in the Wiki at Template:<name>. When you view the page you will probably see the "result" of the template. To change the template just edit the template page. For more information on templates see the page on templates.

Fonts

RinkeHoekstra 03:55, 14 November 2007 (EST)

• Nonterminals are displayed disproportionally large compared to other text. Suggest to replace the style specification for .nonterminal to:

.nonterminal {
    font-weight: bold;
    font-style: italic;
    font-size: small;
    font-family: sans-serif;
}

• Text between

<code>...</code>

elements is displayed too large, and the blue background is not very helpful. Suggest to replace its style specification with:

code {
    font-size: small;
}

Peter Patel-Schneider 23:51, 18 December 2007 (EST)

I think that both of these have to do with the bad design of fonts and browser preferences. In my browser the nonterminals come out fine, i.e., at least with the same interline spacing as regular text. What causes problems for me is the monospaced stuff. I have my regular fonts at 13pt but my monospaced font was Courier at 11pt and even so the monospaced font is bigger. Switching to the default monospaced font fixed the interlinespacing at the expense of uglier glyphs.

Table Layout

By RinkeHoekstra 04:16, 7 November 2007 (EST)

In my opinion, the fonts used in tables are slightly too big, the alignment is confusing and the borders are so 1995!

Can't we use the 'wikitable' class table layout, which is standard on wikipedia.org, or is there a W3 formatting guideline that prevents us from using this layout on our wiki?

If we add the following style information (with perhaps minor changes) to the wiki's style, we should get nice, clean tables such as [1]

/*****
** Table formatting
*****/
  table.wikitable,
  table.prettytable {
     margin:1em 1em 1em 0;
     background:#F9F9F9;
     border:1px #AAA solid;
     border-collapse:collapse;
     }

  table.wikitable th, table.wikitable td,
  table.prettytable th, table.prettytable td {
     border:1px #AAA solid;
     padding:0.2em;
     }

  table.wikitable th,
  table.prettytable th {
     background:#F2F2F2;
     text-align:center;
     }

  table.wikitable caption,
  table.prettytable caption {
     margin-left:inherit;
     margin-right:inherit;
     }

[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Table#Multiplication_table