characters for indenting paragraphs

Question

What keyboard character should be put at the beginning of a new paragraph to make an indention?

Answer 1

If you're talking about the usual convention where the first line of a paragraph is indented and subsequent lines are not, there is no single character or symbol to do this.  In fact, Wikitree policy is that "Indentation should not be used to start paragraphs or for extended quotations. It should only be used for spacing other special elements that need to be set apart from the text."  The colon (:) character will indent the first line and all subsequent lines (left margin aligned).  Typing in five spaces will be stripped out by the Wiki interpreter when displayed.  If you have a bona fide special element need, the most straightforward method is probably to enter

     

at the beginning of the line to create five spaces, followed by your text.  nbsp stands for non-breaking space.

Comments

Wow. I had no idea Chris prefers html code over wiki code for indented quotes.  I've been using ":" for all the years I've been here. I've always thought html code was frowned upon and when we had wikicode equivalents we should use those.

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Hi Jillaine. Kerry is quite correct. https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Help:Quotations has been the style page since 2014.

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Chris,

Thanks for the (belated-- to me) update. I'll update my practice with new editing and update old formatting as I come across it.

Are there other cases where HTML code is preferred over wiki code?

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Hang on.  A : will indent the whole paragraph as a block.    etc will only indent the 1st line of the paragraph.

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Wiki vs HTML is a delusion anyway, because all the tags that look like HTML are interpreted by MediaWiki.  They have to be, because they interact with the wiki tags.

You can't pass anything through.  Any html-style tags not handled by MediaWiki are taken as literal text and the < > are converted to &lt; &gt; so that they can't break the page.

Answer 2

You can use a colon

:

or a few

::

Answer 3

Click here for Help: Editing Tips

List of the Tags / mark up used at WikiTree.