User:Geo Swan/working/Indentation primer

How numbering works: a primer

The wikipedia markup system understands several codes that allow an author to create indented paragraphs.

character name	action
colon	indents about four spaces
star	indents about four spaces, after a "bullet". Good for "point form"
octothorp — number sign	creates consecutively numbered paragraphs. The next paragraph will be numbered one greater than the previous, provided no blank lines are interspersed. A blank line starts a new sequence

Multiple markup codes cause multiple levels of indentation. Three colons will indent the paragraph three times as much as a single colon. The convention on talk pages is that each response should be indented one further level of indentation than the comment it is responsind to.

Different codes can be combined.

If a prefix contains one or more octothorps, but the octothorp is not the rightmost character in the prefix, then no paragraph number is rendered, but the rendering engine does not forget the current paragraph number.

So
# Numbered Point 1
# Numbered point 2
#* a subpoint
#* another subpoint
#* a final subpoint
# Numbered point 3

Renders as:

1. Numbered Point 1
2. Numbered Point 2
   • a subpoint
   • another subpoint
   • a final subpoint
3. Numbered point 3

When the markup rendering engine encounters a prefix of indentation codes that contains multiple octothorps, only the rightmost one is incremented... So # Numbered Point 1
## a second level Numbered point 2
## another second level Numbered point
##* a subpoint
# Numbered point 2
## a second level Numbered point 2
## another second level Numbered point
##* a subpoint
##* another subpoint
##* a final subpoint
# Numbered point 3

Renders as:

1. Numbered Point 1
   1. a second level Numbered point 2
   2. another second level Numbered point
      • a subpoint
2. Numbered Point 2
   1. a second level Numbered point 2
   2. another second level Numbered point
      • a subpoint
      • another subpoint
      • a final subpoint
3. Numbered point 3

When some chooses to add comments into the middle of a numbered list they should make sure the indexing prefix they use has octothorps in the same place as the material they are responding to. Geo Swan 20:50, 10 April 2007 (UTC)