Hints and Help for Using Foswiki

Using Our Wiki for Grant and Manuscript Development

You can attach any document to a wiki page but those attachments are for 'read only' documents such as grant announcement text (optimally in html or pdf), figures, and data collection forms. The way you use wiki for developing grant proposals, manuscripts, etc., is to put the document you are developing in the actual wiki markup format. That way your collaborators can edit the master document and you can have version control and revision history (who changed what when) automatically. When you are finished with the document you merely click on Printable and save the page in html format and have Word open the file to instantly convert it to a .doc document if desired. You can also have the person using Word use their browser, highlight the text to insert, and paste it into an existing Word document (no need to click Printable). Markup formatting, including bullets, will be carried over to Word automatically. When you click on the Edit button you will have to create an ID the first time, and you will see a button to click to get the simple wiki markup rules, e.g.
*Bold Face* _Italicized Text_
bullet and numbered lists, headings, and tables.

If you have a BibTeX bibliographic database attached to a wiki page, you can dynamically call out citations in your wiki markup (see MedStatRefs for a more comprehensive example). You can dynamically create PubMed citations for your document. You can do PubMed searches and have the output in BibTeX format. You can also specify complex tree-type diagrams in the wiki markup, although its best to ask one of our staff to run the graph-drawing commands to output the graphic to a high-resolution format such as postscript or pdf.

Bulleted lists

Wiki-generated bulleted lists can be problematic if you wish to include paragraphs, code chunks, tables, etc. The problem results from line breaks dividing up the lists.

An example of the list be broken (notice that the second item is labeled 1, not 2):
  1. First item up for bid
    1. This is a truly great item
This is a paragraph about the great item
  1. Second item up for bid
You can fix this by using the %BR% variable instead of an actual line break. An example of this working:
  1. First item up for bid
    1. This is a truly great item
      This is a paragraph about the great item
  2. Second item up for bid

This can also work for code chunks if you use <pre> tags instead of <verbatim> tags.

An even better way to accompish this is by using %BR%\, especially for long chunks of code:
  1. It is possible for this to work
    1. Do you know how?
  2. I learned this tip from Thomas
    lots and lots of code
    code about this
    code about that
    function A
    function B
    function C = A+B
    
  3. Pretty neat, eh

However, for tables, these methods won't work well. Instead, you should use HTML code.
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Topic revision: r11 - 06 Aug 2009, FrankHarrell
 

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