SPIP’s typographical shortcuts

To make it easier to format your text, the system offers a certain number of "SPIP shortcuts" aimed at:
-  making life easier for users who don’t know HTML mark-up language;
-  making it easier to automatically format page content.

What are they, then ?

These short-cuts rely on characters that are rarely used in normal text, most notably braces, in order rapidly create italics and bolding for example.

Italics and bolding are generated by the following SPIP short-cuts, entered directly into the text fields in the private zone:

"Some text {in italics}, some text {{in bold}}"

Which will produce the following output displayed on the public site:

"Some text in italics, some text in bold"

These short-cuts make it possible to prepare formatted content online almost as simply as when writing an email.

Automatic French typography

SPIP automatically respects the spacing conventions applied in French typography. As such, hard spaces are automatically prior to the following characters " : ", " ; ", " ! ", " ? " and before and after "French" quotation marks (these spaces are not enforced for text written in other languages - note also that in English, the colon and other characters listed above should NOT normally have spaces within the quotation marks either - they are only here to make this text a little more legible).

List of the short-cuts

Numerous short-cuts are available which can be used to easily create sub-headings, hypertext links, lists or listings, tables, quotations and footnotes, and for easily inserting multimedia documents into your text.

This is not to be construed as an exhaustive list, since all of these short-cuts are introduced and explained in the online help of your SPIP system. Shown here as examples, though, are a few short-cuts that are more frequently applied by SPIP site editors:

-* item
-* item
-* item

Can I use HTML mark-up anyway?

If you so wish, you can of course use HTML mark-up directly in your texts. But we recommend using these short-cuts instead, firstly because they are easier to remember, and secondly because they are subjected to very advantageous automated processes: SPIP replaces them with the correct and validated HTML code, applies the appropriate typographical conventions, and assigns them with CSS class selectors and attributes that facilitate their graphical display by the webmaster, which will not necessarily be the case for any HTML mark-up code that you have entered by yourself.