Formatting text

Basic styles

Inside paragraphs (and in other elements that support it) you can use text formatting which allows you to give text a certain style. Text formatting is done through symbols, enclosing a set of words between two identical symbols. Currently Mau supports

• _underscores_
• *stars*
• ~tildes~
• ^carets^
• `backticks`
• $dollars$
• %percent%

Stars identify *strong* text.

Underscores for _emphasized_ text.

Carets for ^superscript^ and tildes for ~subscript~.

Backticks are used for `verbatim` text.

$Dollars_and_percents$ are %used_to_escape_text%

Mixing styles

Text styles can be used together but backticks have a very strong behaviour in Mau

You can have _*strong and empashized*_ text.

You can also apply styles to _*`verbatim`*_.

But verbatim will `_*preserve*_` them.

Styles can be applied to only part of a word and do not need spaces

*S*trategic *H*azard *I*ntervention *E*spionage *L*ogistics *D*irectorate

It is completely _counter_intuitive.

Parts of words can be ^super^script or ~sub~script.

There are too many `if`s in this function.

Escaping

Using a single style marker doesn't trigger any effect. If you need to use two of them in the sentence, though, you have to escape at least one. Or use $ and %

You can use _single *markers.

But you \_need\_ to escape pairs.

Even though you can escape \_just one_ of the two.

If you have \_more than two\_ it's better to just \_escape\_ all of them.

Or $you_can_just_use_dollars$ and %percents_which_escape_everything%.

Actually $dollars escape %percents%$, and %percents escape $dollars$%.

The purpose of backticks ` is to format code, as you will see in the chapter about templates, while the purpose of dollar $ and percent % is just to make it less complicated to represent text that has a lot of special symbols. Dollars and percents escape each other as they are pretty common symbols that you might need to use.

Text classes

You can assign specific classes to part of the text using the macro class. The way classes are used and rendered depends on the output format. If the output is HTML, those will become CSS classes, while PDF output at the moment doesn't do anything specific.

This is [class]("text wrapped", myclass) in a class.

The HTML output of the code above is

<p>This is <span class="myclass">text wrapped</span> in a class.</p>

You can specify multiple classes as arguments. There is no limit to the number of arguments.

This is [class]("text wrapped", myclass1, myclass2) in multiple classes.

Resulting in

<p>This is <span class="myclass1 myclass2">text wrapped</span> in multiple classes.</p>

Please note that the text passed to the macro class can contain Mau code such as styles.

This is [class]("*text with styles* _wrapped_", "myclass") in a class.

Horizontal rule

You can add a separator or horizontal rule using three dashes --- on a separate line.

---

Links

Since markup languages are mostly used to write hyperlinked documents, links play a big part in the syntax. In Mau, links are created with the macro link.

The source code can be found at [link](https://github.com/Project-Mau/mau).

The values between round brackets are arguments (see Basic syntax).

Add text to the link

You can add optional text to the link that will replace the URL in the rendered text

The source code can be found
on [link](https://github.com/Project-Mau/mau, GitHub).

Using spaces and quotes

If the title contains spaces or the closing parenthesis ) you need to wrap it between double quotes

The source code can be found
on [link](https://github.com/Project-Mau/mau, "the GitHub page").

Should you need to add quotes to the title you will have to escape them

The main [link](https://github.com/Project-Mau/mau, "\"repository\"").

The same rules are valid for the URL

A [link]("https://example.org/?q=[a b]","URL with special characters").

Mailto links

Mailto links can be created with the mailto macro, which works like the link macro described above.

Get in touch at [mailto](info@example.com).

Rich text

The text added to a link is rendered using Mau, so you can include styles or other macros, as long as the output makes sense in the target format. To avoid clashes between Mau syntax and arguments syntax, if you have rich text it is recommended to explicitly mark it as a named text argument.

The source code can be found
on [link]("https://github.com/Project-Mau/mau", text="*GitHub*").

In this case, the syntax [link]("https://github.com/Project-Mau/mau", "*GitHub*") would be interpreted as a link with subtype GitHub because of the leading *.

As for rich text, remember that Mau doesn't understand output formats, it merely uses templates. So, while it is possible in Mau to insert a link as a text for a link, that doesn't make sense in HTML or TeX.