Purpose and Instructions

[Katzaniel]

~Threads and Posts~

The purpose of this entire forum is to describe your character. And to find information on other people's characters. In order for ease of finding desired information, we are going to try separating the data into some categories. There will be three types of topics, all optional:

Title: Your Pen Name
Subtitle: "The Writer"
ex) Katzaniel - The Writer
Ideally, this can contain any or all of the following:

• Introduction: An initial post with a quick introduction to yourself.
• Biography: A more detailed biography.
• List of Works: A list of the things you've written. You can either just list them, or use tables (explained below) to format the information you want to include.

Title: Your Character's Name
Subtitle: "Character of " with your Pen Name
ex) Inbi Infusco - Character of Katzaniel
ex) Katzaniel - Character of Katzaniel
Ideally, you would include any or all of the following:

• Brief Description: In the first post, I'm hoping.
• History: Events in the past that shaped your character.
• Abilities: The skills s/he has.
• Magical Abilities: Magical powers s/he has.
• Items: Weapons or other things that they carry with them.
• Physical Description: The way they appear to others. What they often wear. Identifying marks.
• Personality: How they act.
• Relationships: How they interact with other characters. Friends, family, roommates and other aquaintances could be listed here.
• Other: Anything that doesn't fit well into one of the above.

Title: "Other Characters"
Subtitle: "Created by " and your Pen Name
ex) Other Characters - Created by Katzaniel
This would just include the character's name as the "title" of each post (as explained in the next post, the title of the post should have a "~" on each side) and then whatever info you feel is needed on them.

More might be added later. In the meantime, if you have something you'd like to add, PM it to me or comment in the Suggestion Box and it will most likely find its way into the list.

Now, each of these items should go in its own post within your thread, so that it's easier to search.

Edited June 14, 2014 by Tanuchan
broken link

[Katzaniel]

~Titles~

 

Also, to aid in searching, please add a "~" (tilde) before and after each title. The reason for this is that if there's nothing to distinguish the title "Skills" (for example) from the word "skills" used somewhere in any of your posts, then the search finds more than one result and it's less useful that way. So if every title has the tildes, it's easier all round.

 

To see what I mean, look at the titles I've used in this topic. Note: The bolding is optional. If you do bold it or format it in any way, be careful that the formatting encompasses both the tildes and the title, ie)

 

~Titles~

not

~Titles~

Edited September 25, 2004 by Katzaniel

[Katzaniel]

~Links~

 

If you want to make use of links, remember to note the page address when you submit your post, and use that to link. Alternatively, you could Search for your post and right-click on the link, clicking properties and copying the address from there.

 

Either click on the "http://" button above the textbox and follow the instructions, or use the following ubb code:

 

[URL=http://www.yourlink.com]The text to show[/URL]

{Addition by Yui-chan: (Katz, feel free to replace with your own version of this information or delete, if you want.)

 

Alternatively, you can use Static URLs:

 

What are they? They are hotlinks that are set to open in the same (non-origin) window rather than each opening in a new window. For example, clicking on static link #1 will open site #1 in its own window. Clicking on static link #2 will replace site #1 with site #2. Re-clicking on static link #1 will replace site #2 with site #1. Ad infinitum for any number of static URLs.

 

Static URLs use the following commands:

 

[staticurl=http://blahblah]Hyperlink text here[/staticurl]
[staticurl]http://blahblah[/staticurl]

Things to note about static urls:

 

They have all the same error characteristics as normal URL tags, so if you forget to close it, mistype it, whatever... it will show up verbatim in the post, and your link will not work. Also, the static window is not post or thread dependent. If you open up static link #1 from thread A, then click static link #2 from thread B, site #2 will still replace site #1 in the other window. }

Edited February 8, 2005 by Yui-chan

[Katzaniel]

~Tables~

 

Yui has made it possible for everyone to use tables. Bows thankfully to Yui. I'll try to describe it here.

 

Step 1:

 

Click the button and enter the preferred size. 50% spans half the post, 100% all of it, and so on. See below.

 

 

Alternately, Enter [table=XX%], where XX is the size you want your table to be.

 

Either way, you'll have to type [/TABLE] when you're done. The entire table will always be between the [TABLE=XX%] and [/TABLE] tags.

 

 

100% Table

50% Table

 

You can center it, too, via the usual tags (but not until you've completed the other steps):

 

Centered 80% Table

 

Step 2:

 

To add a row (even just one), type [TR] and [/TR]. That stands for "Table Row". You'll need both of these tags for every row you add.

 

Step 3:

 

To add a column or cell within a row (always try to have the same number of cells in each row, or the look may surprise you), add [TD] and [/TD]. It means "Table Data" and, the same as for the rows, you'll need these tags for each cell in the table.

 

So, a table with one row and four cells would look like this:

 

[table=100%][tr][td]Item A[/td][td]Item B[/td][td]Item C[/td][td]Item D[/td][/tr][/table]

 

Item A

Item B

Item C

Item D

 

I've bolded the data so you can see it more easily, but the bolding is not in the code I showed you.

 

A table with four items, two cells in two rows, could be done with this code:

 

[table=100%][tr][td]Item A[/td][td]Item B[/td][/tr]

[tr][td]Item C[/td][td]Item D[/td][/tr][/table]

 

Item A	Item B
Item C	Item D

 

Note: Although it is easier to look at it on two lines, when you're done with the table you should put it into one big line (although it will spill over by itself, be careful that you backspace after every time you pressed enter). If you leave all the "endlines" (as they are often called) in there, the UBB code doesn't know what to do with them - they're not part of the table, because they're between cells, so it puts them above the table and you get a lot of whitespace that you probably don't want.

Edited September 25, 2004 by Katzaniel

[Katzaniel]

~Table Headings~

(Forgive the lateness... I thought I had done this long ago, with the other post.)

 

 

If you want much prettier tables, you can very easily get them to look just like the bigger tables that contain all of the posts in a thread. It will automatically appear different in the different skins, and really just looks fancy and cool.

 

To do that, you only have to replace the "td" (table data) tags with "titlecell" or "headercell".

 

Thus,

 

[table=100%][tr][titlecell]Title cell[/titlecell][headercell]Header cell[/headercell][td]Normal cell[/td][/tr][/table]

 

 

results in

Title cell

Header cell

Normal cell

 

Of course, there's very little reason to want a table that looks like that. What you'll most likely do is set it up so that each row is consistent with the type of cell you use. You'll probably even have the first row as Title cells, maybe the second row as Header cells* and the rest as normal cells. Or possibly a header row every few lines, like in a List of works:

 

 

 

 

My List of Works
Poetry
Some Poem	Some Info about Poem
Some Other Poem	Some Info about Poem
Stories
Some Story	Some Info about Story
Some Other Story	Some Info about Story

 

This might not be the best way to do it since you don't get headings explaining what info you're giving about the poem or story, but it does let me show you the basic idea, and also how to do blank cells. Well, blank cells aren't very complicated, you just have to remember to put a "space" (ie, hit the spacebar once) between the tags. Here's the code:

 

 

[table=100%][tr][titlecell]My List of Works[/titlecell][titlecell] [/titlecell][/tr]

[tr][headercell]Poetry[/headercell][headercell] [/headercell][/tr]

 

[tr][td]Some Poem[/td][td]Some Info about Poem[/td][/tr]

 

[tr][td]Some Other Poem[/td][td]Some Info about Poem[/td][/tr]

 

[tr][headercell]Stories[/headercell][headercell] [/headercell][/tr]

 

[tr][td]Some Story[/td][td]Some Info about Story[/td][/tr]

 

[tr][td]Some Other Story[/td][td]Some Info about Story[/td][/tr][/table]

 

 

I've left the line breaks in because it'll be much easier to read and understand, but don't forget to go through and remove them when you're done. (I recommend starting at the end and going up, it just seems to be easier.)

 

Good luck!

 

 

* If you're planning on having just one of the two, ie a Title row and then normal, or a Header and then normal, you might want to consider what it looks like in different skins. The Title cell has a darker line along the top in the tan skin and a lighter line along the bottom in the black skin. This probably doesn't affect you as it looks decent either way (contrary to my memory and what I initially said in this post) but you might want to go with Header since it's more predictable, or constant in appearance, across the skins.

Edited May 5, 2005 by Katzaniel

[reverie]

broken table

 

 

Hmm, I seem to accidently broken my table format in my piazza portrait.

Question? Did the format for table's change when in the board upgrade.

 

I can't seem to make since of what I'm doing wrong. Any ideas?

 

Thanks,

 

rev...

[Tanuchan]

I remember I had trouble with my tables, because they were suddenly turned into HTML-coded ones during the upgrade... and when I tried to edit them, the board refused to acknowledge them completely - Yui had to reconvert them for me.

Also, there was a change in the original code, but I honestly don't remember what it was - it was something small, but that affected the title cells, I think.

As I don't remember what your description was like, rev... what's exactly the trouble with your description? If you go to my list of works, you can quote any of my tables to see the code I used... or PM me, I'll try to help

~Tanny

[Katzaniel]

Yeah, as soon as you try to edit one of the old tables now, it messes it up. But that's okay, as it's not that hard to fix with Find/Replaces via Notepad or some such - I'll outline the method here at some point, but not just now. In the meantime, I *think* I fixed your problem - you seem to have linked a thread with no tables, but I found and fixed a thread of your with tables in it. (Note that I have kept a copy of the original post in case I made a mistake.)

 

Appendum: The minor change to which Tanny is referring is, I believe, the fact that [table=100%] is now simply [table].

Edited December 10, 2005 by Katzaniel