Public Service Announcement

[chthonya]

A while ago I noticed a challenge that included a handy template for participants to cut and paste so that all replies were consistently formatted.

What a good idea, I thought, and promptly went off to the LJ FAQ to find out how to do it. Unfortunately it's not mentioned there, so I eventually gave in and asked someone. Recently someone asked me, so I wouldn't be surprised if there are others out there who'd like to know.

So:

To make a little box like this, where you can include html tags <b>like these</b> for people to copy and paste, use this command: <textarea rows=X cols=Y> text goes here [/textarea] X is the number of text lines you want to show and Y is the width in character-width (I used x=10 and y=70 for this box). You can use just <textarea> without specifying the height and width, but the default box is so small that it's difficult to read what's inside if there's more than about five words. The square brackets in the closing tag are, of course, replaced by angled brackets. Vertical scroll bars appear automatically when needed. Text wraps when the line is longer than the box is wide.

Hope that's helpful, both for those creating the templates and those using them. :)