There are a lot of ways to use this forum, but it's helpful to know all the tips and tricks, especially with formatting. I know many of you know some or all of this, but there may be posters who do not, so I thought I would post this here. It includes links that the Webmaster has created. For future reference, the referenced posts are available by going to the "Get Started" link under the Travel Forum link in the left hand column.
Using the Travel Forum gives you a general overview of how to use the forum, including ways to frame your questions to get better responses, and how to get notifications of responses to your created posts.
Understanding Markdown explains how to format your posts if you desire (Markdown is a markup language RS uses to add formatting to plain text). As many of you know, you can use the icons directly above the comment/reply boxes for formatting. For example, the capital "B" makes words bold, the "I" italicizes them, the globe allows you to insert a weblink into a particular word or phrase, and the quotation marks allow you to use block quotes (such as quoting a phrase or sentence from a prior comment).
To the right of them are icons for using
- numbered headings
and
- bullet points
Next to the bullet points is a:
Large Heading Icon
That said, this formatting can be done manually as well. For example, to make a word BOLD you can highlight the word and key
Command+B (on a Mac) or Control+B on a PC. OR you can add 2 asterisks before the word and 2 after, like this: *word*.
I almost always do the bullet points manually since I think clicking the icon is somewhat cumbersome to use. It's easier to just manually create them by using asterisks, + signs or hyphens. Here is the "how-to" from the Understanding Markdown page:
Bulleted lists: use asterisks, pluses, and hyphens (*, +, and -) as list markers. For example, if you write:
*Candy
*Gum
*Booze
OR
- Candy
- Gum
- Booze
This would appear in your published post.
- Candy.
- Gum.
- Booze.
OR
- Candy.
- Gum.
- Booze.
In other words, any of those characters - the asterisk, the hyphen or the + sign will insert a bullet point in there.
One last tip - if you forget what the icons above the box are for, just hover your cursor above one and it will tell you what it is. Also, if you want to test out formatting, just try some of it in a test post or reply box. You can see what everything will look like in the grey box below.