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How to Format Text

When you write posts in the Forum, and when you write the main section of your Profile, you can do simple text formatting by adding special characters as you type.

For example...

You can *use asterisks* to emphasize words.
And those words will be converted to ITALIC and displayed like this:
You can use asterisks to emphasize words.
Note that there are no spaces between the asterisks and the words they surround.
Using * extra spaces * doesn't do it.
Displays like this:
Using * extra spaces * doesn’t do it.

Here are some more formatting tricks:

Use **double asterisks** for bold.
Use double asterisks for bold.
For ***bold AND italic***, use 3 stars.
For bold AND italic, use 3 stars.
Underscores _make underlines_
Underscores make underlines
Nesting works: *italic with **bold** nested*.
Nesting works: italic with bold nested.

Web addresses (URLs) that start with “www” or “http” are automatically converted to links. If you want to make a text link, here is how:

This is a [clickable link](http://www.example.com)
Results:
This is a clickable link

Note that there is no space between the closing bracket and the opening parenthesis: [link text](www.url.com)

Finally, you can make one or more paragraphs into a block quote by putting a greater-than symbol ( > ) at the beginning of each paragraph:

> This is a blockquote.

This is not part of the blockquote.
Results:
This is a blockquote.
This is not part of the blockquote.

TIP: If you make a mistake with the formatting, you can click the Edit link on your post and fix it.

By the way... If you know how to use HTML tags, you can do that, too. The following tags are allowed: <i>, <em>, <b>, <strong>, <u>, <a href="">, <blockquote>, <strike>, <code>, <sup>, <sub>