(See AdminGuide for help on installation/configuration.)

In here, you can find help on text-formatting directives and tips.

Have fun!


This is a short summary of all directives, to get you up and running (and editing) as soon as possible.

@directive	(See 'Directives list' below.) Starts a multiline-block under control of directive. The '@' must appear in the leftmost column. There must be no text after the directive.
@	Ends a multiline-block. The '@' must appear in the leftmost column. There must be no text after it.
%directive(text)	Inline directive. Applies to text only.

[topic]	(Explicit) link to topic. No implicit topic links exists.
[#section-title]	(Explicit) link to section-title within this topic. No implicit section-links exists.
[http://foo.bar/baz]	(Explicit) link to URL. No implicit URL links exist.
[http://foo.bar/baz|descr]	Explicitly named URL link (appears as descr).

+ title	Heading 1 (biggest); '+' must occur in the leftmost column.
++ title	Heading 2 (medium); '+' must occur in the leftmost column.
+++ title	Heading 3 (small); '+' must occur in the leftmost column.
* text	(Unordered) list item; '*' must occur in the leftmost column.
\char	Escapes special char char.

*text*	Output text bold.
_text_	Output text slanted.

@pre	Preformatted text block. Output raw HTML block.
@code	Pretty-print sourcecode, Don't alter indent, escape HTML codes.
%inc(topic)	Inserted interpreted contents of topic at this point.
%color(text)	Colorize text, where color may be one of 'red', 'green', 'blue', 'pink', 'white', 'cyan', 'yellow'.
%img(URL)	Output image URL.

A user creates and edits topics, which contain text and text-formatting directives that specify text layout - that's all. A 'topic' is a wiki page about one well-defined subject; it contains text about the subject, and references to related topics as well as external links.

In MicKI, a topic is created the first time someone requests it. Nonexistent topics are shown in red, while existing ones are shown in friendly green.

Thus, if you create a link to new (non-existent) topic, a new topic with default contents will be created and shown. You can then edit it to your liking; the next time someone requests it, it will already exist, and the new contents will be shown.

There is no way to delete existing topics. I will have to rethink this; right now I don't see a need to - they will just bleed to death, no harm done.


When MicKI is started without an argument (e.g. on first run), it checks whether an initial topic named 'Home' exists.

This is no different from other topics, with the exception that it is the default in case no topic was specified (e.g. when MicKI was called as 'http://foo.bar/cgi-bin/micki', thus, without topic argument).


Apart from normal topics (corresponding to disk files), there are also a number of internal topics built into the MicKI engine, such as this help page.

You can access internal topics from the menu bar at the top of the page, or at every section title.

Available internal topics are:

• edit (choose 'Edit' from the menu)
• printer-friendly rendering (choose 'Print' from the menu)
• topic list (choose 'Topics' from the menu)
• user guide (choose 'Help!' from the menu - you are reading it now)
• admin guide (choose 'Help!', and then click the 'AdminGuide' link near the top)

Note, however, that internal topics are basically no different (with some exceptions ;-) than normal topics; they are just built into the engine.


As with any proper wiki, text-formatting directives were chosen to be minimal yet complete, and be easy to 'read through' when editing a topic-page. MicKI-directives can be divided into

• inline directives
• single-line directives
• multi-line directives

All three directive-groups are discussed hereafter.


Inline directives are used to perform an operation 'inline', e.g. including another topic on the spot, or pretty-printing some text.

Some inline directives look like normal text, while others require a little more syntax, and are of this form:


where 'directive' is a directive name, such as 'inc', and 'text' is the directive argument.

Depending on the directive in question, this argument can be a filename, topic name, or a normal text string, and may or may not be formatted.

Inline directives of this form may not be nested (yet).

All inline directives are discussed in detail hereafter.


The pretty-printing (or purrdey-printing, if you will) directives have only one purpose, and that is to decorate your text.

All these purrdey-printing directives are listed below.


The Bold-directive is used as follows:


resulting in something like this:


For this to work, the opening '*'...

• can't occur at leftmost column (else it would be a list item)
• must occur at a start-of-word.

For example, this...


... works, and produces


while this...


...does not. However you can use


to produce


Of course, this doesn't work either:


One more thing: a bold sequence can't span multiple lines.


This is very similar to the bold-functionality above, and produces slanted text; for example, this...


...will produce something like this:


Furthermore, the same restrictions from the bold-functionality apply here.


These last 2 directives can be combined, if you take care to have each directive start at a start-of-word (!): this...


doesn't work as expected, and produces this:


but this...


works after all:



Colors are Super Duper Nice! To specify colors, use one of the following directives:

• %red()
• %green()
• %blue()
• %pink()
• %white()
• %yellow()
• %cyan()

For example, this...


...will produce something like this:


(As you can see, simple formatting directives such as bold and italic can be applied to the directive-argument; in the previous example, the word 'yellow' was printed in bold.)

Please take in mind that the color-directives don't span multiple lines, and that you should use pirate-lingo only when alone, and even then, with care.


To use pīnyīn (romanized Chinese) characters, type...

• '!', followed by...
• the vowel in question (use "u:" for the u-with-dots), followed by...
• the tone mark (a digit from 1 to 4)

That's all. For example, this...


would result in...


Another example (illustrating the "u-with-dots"):


would produce...


A test-matrix to see if your browser supports all pīnyīn characters:

tone:	1	2	3	4
a:	ā	á	ǎ	à
e:	ē	é	ě	è
o:	ō	ó	ǒ	ò
i:	ī	í	ǐ	ì
u:	ū	ú	ǔ	ù

tone:	(toneless)	1	2	3	4
u-with-dots:	ü	ǖ	ǘ	ǚ	ǜ

Links in this context are simply references to other topics, or to external URLs. Each of these links are described below.


Section links refer to a section within the current topic. A section link works as follows:


which would give you:


Some words of wisdom and/or warning:

• there is no error checking whether the section in question actually exists.
• in the link definition, you must type the exact title of the section you want to refer to; click the 'non-existent section name' link above, to see what happens otherwise - probably nothing. :-)
• the TOC-entries use a different anchor scheme, using sequence numbers. Therefore, you should not just copy/paste the link from the (rendered) TOC as the browser sees it - it will work, but link targets are volatile. Copy/paste the section title instead, while editing the topic.

Topic links refer to other topics within the wiki web. You can create a topic link like this:


resulting in this:


If this is the first time you see this help page, the topic link is probably red, indicating the topic does not (yet) exist. Clicking on the link will create the topic, so that the next time you see it, it would be green instead, like this:


Topic links, as opposed to URL links, described hereafter, can't carry an additional description - that is, a topic-link always looks like the topic name (which is good).


URL links are, surprise, links to external URLs. They can occur in 2 forms, the first of which is like this:


and will result in something like this:


The second form is with additional description, and is used like this:


which will result in


Note that URL links are always displayed in green.


One of the nicer things in MicKI is that you can inline topics. What does that mean?

Consider a normal topic link:


(The 'HelpTestTopic' topic is an internal topic, just for the sake of example. Try clicking it now, and note its contents.)

What happens here, is that MicKI generates a link to the 'HelpTestTopic' topic, without displaying the actual 'HelpTestTopic' contents itself (of course).

Instead, you can also inline a topic, which means that the topic contents, rather than the link to the topic, are generated; use


to generate this:


As you can see, the 'HelpTestTopic' contents are generated inline. Not just that, but they are generated just like every topic would, meaning that directives are expanded and all.

And yes, it is still possible to make circular references and hang your server process :-)


I guess it's no surprise that you can inline pictures as well:


will result in


(The picture there is indeed from another site.)

Specify img-argument either like above (external image) or like this:


(Note that this is not actually shown here, since I can't rely on you having access to the foobar.png(tm) picture!)

Local images are located relative to the IMGROOT path. (See the AdminGuide for more info.)


Sometimes you don't want normal directives' actions to kick in. For example,...


will result in


...and you really don't want that. (Yes, an error, call the press.)

In such cases, you can use the '\' character to escape relevant directive characters, like this:


resulting in


Use of the '\' char is pretty obvious and not further documented; use your intuition, e.g.


will inhibit directive-action, resulting in



Single-line directives operate on one whole line. That is, they occur at the start of a line (as opposed to inline directives), and determine the fate of the whole line, so to say.

All single-line directives are discussed below.


(Sub)section titles are always on a separate line by themselves, and have the following form:


...which would result in a subsection title. You can see plenty of those already on this page, so there isn't one output now.

The number of '+' characters indicates the nesting level; 1 '+' means page-nesting (as in, outermost nesting level), and nesting levels range from 1 to 6, where 6 is a sub-sub-sub-sub-subsection.

The previous example had nesting level 5 (since there were 5 '+' characters).

Above each topic-page, there's a table of contents displayed, provided there were at least 2 sections on that page. You can click on the an entry in the table of contents, to bring you to the appropriate (sub)section on the page.


To generate an unordered list of items, use something like this:


which will result in...

The trout...

• are very valuable
• are immensely powerful
• have underwater weapons

(Unfortunately I cannot nest Multi-line-directives yet, so no box around the list there ;-)

The '*' characters must occur in the leftmost column. There may or may not be text directly above the 1st item, like in above example.


To generate a table of cells, use something like...


to produce...

all	your	base
what	you	say!

(Same as with unordered list, above: I can't put this in a box yet :-)

The '|' chars must occur in the leftmost column, and there must be a '|' character at the end of each cell as well.

You can also indicate special cells (e.g. row- or column-descriptions), using a '#' immediately following the cell border ('|'), like this:


This would give something like...

animals	land	sea
small	mouse	shrimp
big	elephant	whale

(The 'land' and 'sea' column-descriptions as well as 'small' and 'big' row-descriptions have a '#' as 1st cell character, so those cells stand out from the rest.)

As you can see, cell contents may contain text-formatting directives, and are processed just as normal topic contents.

A table cell may not be empty. There is no support for row-/colspan. There is no support for tables within tables. Resistance is futile. Watchen das blinkenlichten.


Multi-line-directives specify that a whole block, from start- to end-marker, are subject to some operation. A multi-line directive is of the form


(where 'directive' is a single keyword)

The '@' character must occur at the leftmost column. All multi-line directives are discussed below.


Sometimes you want to maintain the exact layout of a block of text. To do so, use something like this:


resulting in this lovely ascii art:


Note that these 2 look almost the same, except for the '@pre...@' directive.

It will be no surprise that all the blocks describing literal syntax in the previous examples, were made out of these preformatted text blocks.


Code blocks are very similar to preformatted text blocks, except that they contain line numbers, and - in some distant future - may handle syntax hilighting.

Use code blocks like this:


to produce something like this:


Note that I mainly use this for C, Perl and shellcode, but the choice of '@' as directive start-/end-markers may be very inconvenient for your favourite programming language.


What I call Boxed text, is just topic-content in a box. Almost everything that can be in a topic, will look the same when in a box.

...'Almost' everything, since you can't have

• (sub)sections,
• unordered lists, and
• nested multi-line directives

This is mainly due to the anonymous multi-line directive end-marker ('@'), and partly because I am too lazy to make it better :-)

As an illustration of a boxed text, consider this example:


which will result in...


So, boxed text can be used to emphasize topic content, without losing the power of directives (as opposed to using the preformatted text and code directives).


The above is all you need to know to be able to use MicKI, however, below are some tips to make life a bit more pleasant.


MicKI uses the concept 'everything is a topic', which makes a lot of things very simple.

That is, it's merely a guideline, but things can be simpler if users stick to this idea :-) Directives were chosen to promote this.

An example: you may have a datasheet about some electronics component, or an image of a relative somewhere, stored under a filename. You would probably want to refer to them as 'NiceDatasheet' and 'MySister' rather than 'http://some.where/obscure/path/foobar.pdf' and 'family/2004/IMG1234.JPG', right?

Using the '%inc()'-directive, one can inline topic contents in another topic. This feature is quite powerful; you can make a topic like this:


and name the topic 'DatasheetIC1234'. That way, you can use one fixed reference all over the place, by inlining your 'reference'-topic, like this:


which will result in something like...


As for the family example, you can make a topic like this:


...and name it 'FamilyMembers'. It could be used like this:


resulting in...


Nice eh? :-) Avoid duplication of volatile information, like the man said.