Up to now I’ve been typing all my posts in plain Roman text, using CAPS for emphasis, because that’s all I know how to do in whatever word-processing program this board uses. But most of the dopers use bold type, italics, even text of different sizes and colors. How can I do those things?
Also, whenever a doper includes a quote from a previous post, there appears to be a standard format – two horizontal lines, text between them, bolded and indented. How do I do that?
And how can I imbed a link to a website, or to another thread, or some other document from the SD site, such as one of Cecil’s old columns? My practice has been simply to type in the whole URL for an Internet link; I’ve figured out no way to do an intra-site link.
And then there are the smilies. I see them to the left of this text as I’m typing it, but I never see a smilies menu in the posting window at the bottom of a thread. How do I select and insert them?
The Quick Reply window, which is the window at the bottom of the page, doesn’t have the buttons for formatting, including smilies. That’s what makes it a Quick Reply.
If you click on Post Reply, you get to see all the formatting gadgetry, including bold and italic. But you can type the codes in yourself if you want. Simply enclose B in brackets for bold, and enclose /B in brackets to turn off bold.
For example, {B}this is bold{/B} (but change the braces to brackets }.
You can always see the coding someone used in a post by clicking the Quote button at the bottom of a post.
Also, there’s undoubtedly many threads about this in the **About This Message Board **forum.