Illuminated Manuscripts: Vanilla Help

Intro

Vanilla (see vanilla-info for comments from developer) uses "snips" to store content in vanilla-space. These snip can be linked to or included in a page. Guidance on naming snips is to use meaningful words with hyphens between the words (e.g. *some-page-name*). When you create a page the page name will be created from the title you give it.

Creating links

Use asterisks to denote a link. E.g. a link to "test-snip" snip is done like this: *test-snip*, and you can also write *Test Snip* to link to the same page. Links to urls can be done similarly: *http://www.google.com*.

You can change the display text of a link by separating it with a vertical bar - e.g. *home|Go to the home page* results in Go to the home page.

Links to email addresses are done similarly - e.g. *mailto:someuser@example.com* or *someuser@example.com*. The links that are created in this way are obscured to prevent them being harvested for spam, but can be clicked on by normal users.

Including content

Use curly braces to include other content E.g. the content from "webmaster" is included as follows: {webmaster}, which displays as follows:

Webmaster contact details can be included here.

!

(N.B.the background colour has been changed so you can more easily see the scope of the included content).

When content is included in this way you will see a ! at the bottom right of the content. If you click on this it will allow you to directly edit the included content.

Formatting rules

The text markup language has in-built support for limited formatting.

  • __Double underlines__ are expanded as bold
  • HTML tags can be inserted into the text for fomatting if desired
  • space-hyphen rendered as bullets. Bullet collections should be preceded and followed by a blank line
  • bold text on a line on its own becomes heading 3

To insert special characters, simply escape them with the backslash character:

  • to insert * type \*
  • to insert { type \{
  • to insert } type \}
  • to insert __ type \__
  • to insert > type \>
  • to insert < type \<

Including real HTML

You can mix HTML in your content if you wish. To include HTML without having extra paragraphs put in for every new line, simply ensure the html content is wrapped in <html>...</html>. For example, simply paste in the full html of a valid HTML page.

Other comments

  • Dont use characters that are special to HTML like >, <, &, + in the title - vanilla doesn't seem to like it.
  • Once you've created a snip you can't delete it without coming out of vanilla. You can contact the webmaster if you are desperate.
  • renaming a snip causes a copy to be made - the original is preserved.

Keyboard shortcuts

Hold down Alt-shift plus one of the following keys to invoke the following, commonly used functions:

  • e : edit
  • f : find
  • n : new
  • h : home
  • s : save

Advanced

There is scope for writing specialist scripts and running them to generate content (so-called "dyna-snips"). For example the complete listing of all existing snips (see vanilla-space-list page) is done this way. Send requests to webmaster