Help on Structured Text

Structured text is text that uses indentation and simple symbology to indicate the structure of a document.

A structured string consists of a sequence of paragraphs separated by one or more blank lines. Each paragraph has a level which is defined as the minimum indentation of the paragraph. A paragraph is a sub-paragraph of another paragraph if the other paragraph is the last preceding paragraph that has a lower level.

Special symbology is used to indicate special constructs:

• A single-line paragraph whose immediately succeeding paragraphs are lower level (indented) is treated as a header.

• A paragraph that begins with a -, *, or o is treated as an unordered list (bullet) element.

• A paragraph that begins with a sequence of digits followed by a white-space character is treated as an ordered list element.

• A paragraph that begins with a sequence of sequences, where each sequence is a sequence of digits or a sequence of letters followed by a period, is treated as an ordered list element.

• A paragraph with a first line that contains some text, followed by some white-space and -- is treated as a descriptive list element. The leading text is treated as the element title.

• Sub-paragraphs of a paragraph that ends in the word example or the word examples, or :: is treated as example code and is output as is.

• Text surrounded by * characters (with white-space to the left of the first * and whitespace or puctuation to the right of the second *) is emphasized.

• Text surrounded by ** characters (with white-space to the left of the first ** and whitespace or puctuation to the right of the second **) is made strong.

• Text surrounded by _ underscore characters (with whitespace to the left and whitespace or punctuation to the right) is made underlined.

• Text enclosed single quotes (with white-space to the left of the first quote and whitespace or puctuation to the right of the second quote) is treated as example code.

• Text enclosed by double quotes followed by a colon, a URL, and concluded by punctuation plus white space, or just white space, is treated as a hyper link. For example:

  "Zope":http://www.zope.org/ is ...

  Is interpreted as <a href="http://www.zope.org/">Zope</a> is .... Note: This works for relative as well as absolute URLs.

• Text enclosed by double quotes followed by a comma, one or more spaces, an absolute URL and concluded by punctuation plus white space, or just white space, is treated as a hyper link. For example:

  "mail me", mailto:amos@digicool.com.

  Is interpreted as "<a href="mailto:amos@digicool.com">mail me</a>."