If you don't know HTML, that won't stop you from making your stories and posts as nicely formatted and fancy as posts by those who do. If you set your "Post Mode" in Comment Preferences to "Auto Format", Scoop will do its best to format your comment based on its contents, instead of forcing you to litter it with tags. The following page will describe the mechanics used by Scoop to format comments and stories posted in "Auto Format" mode.

Paragraphs and line breaks

In order to start a new paragraph, simply press Enter twice. To insert a line break, press Enter once. Note that text will automatically wrap to fit the size of the screen, so line breaks like that are generally unnecessary. In most cases, you shouldn't need to hit Enter at all except for paragraph breaks.

Bold and Italics

If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, you can type it into the text box surrounded in asterisks (*), *like this*. This will cause the text between the asterisks to be rendered in bold type. Similarly, you can also enter text between underscores (_) or slashes (/), _like this_ /or this/, in order to render the given text in italics.

Of course, you can't post on the Web without needing to insert a link every now and then. Creating a link is as simple as typing in the URL (the address shown in your browser's toolbar at the top of the window). Auto Format mode will automatically turn all URLs into links. For example, if you were to type the following text:

This website runs weblog software from http://scoop.kuro5hin.org.

the resulting comment will look like this:

This website runs weblog software from http://scoop.kuro5hin.org.

Of course, it's not always desirable to have the text of the link be the same as the target of the link. You can use brackets ('[' and ']') in order to specify both the link text and link target. For example, if you wanted the text "This search engine" to point to http://www.google.com/, you would type the following:

[This search engine http://www.google.com/]

Which will render like so:

This search engineMaking lists

You can create bulleted lists by entering a series of lines starting with an asterisk followed by a space ('* '). Numbered lists can be created similarly, by typing a series of lines beginning with a number follwed by a period ('1. '). For example, typing in the following text:

I had these items for breakfast this morning:* Eggs* Bacon* Toast* Hot grits

will give the following result:

I had these items for breakfast this morning:
  • Eggs
  • Bacon
  • Toast
  • Hot grits