LukeTheCat
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- Apr 23, 2015
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Thread Formatting Guide
In this guide, I will teach you how to properly format a thread. This will increase the readability of your threads and will make them look more polished. Throughout this guide, you will learn techniques to improve the formatting of your posts and how to avoid the common formatting mistakes people make. Keep in mind that this thread is not meant to be an example of a perfect thread, as there is only a limited amount of formatting I can demonstrate on a guide comprised completely of text. Everything posted in this guide can be accessed using the Rich Text Editor built into XenForo.
Font
One of the easiest ways to make your guides look better is to choose a clean-looking font. The default font, 'Georgia', isn't the most pleasing font to look at when reading large paragraphs of text. I recommend using a more rounded and 'softer' font, such as 'Arial' or 'Verdana'. For this guide, I chose to use the Verdana font.
Headings
The use of headings is vital to any guide of reasonable length, but I come across a lot of guides which have poorly formatted headings and sub-headings. Keep a consistent style for your headings and sub-headings across the entire guide. You can see that I have not chosen to use any sub-headings in this guide, but I recommend using them for longer guides with multiple sections. For my headings, I have chosen to use bold text with a font size of 6, compared to the regular font size of 4.
Indentation
The indentation feature is one I see rarely utilized in the guides posted on this forum, even though it dramatically improves readability and can make your threads look a lot cleaner. Indentations are typically used when writing under a new heading or sub-heading, but can also be used for showing important information to the reader; as indented elements tend to stand out. Indentations can also be nested within each other.
Color
The use of color is not something I encourage people to use when writing guides, but in some cases, it is beneficial; so long as the right colors are chosen. Colors too light make the guide much harder to read, and may put people off; Colors too dark don't compliment black text well and aren't particularly pleasing. I tend to stay away from colored text in my guides, except for uses in lists and occasionally headings.
Emphasis
I find that emphasis is typically overused in guides on this forum and detracts from what it's meant to be used for. Bold or italic text in a body should really only be used to emphasise things; to get a point across to the reader. Underlined text can be used to enhance this emphasis, but I usually exclusively use underlining in titles.
Alignment
Since XenForo's Text Editor doesn't appear to support justification yet, a different alignment must be chosen. As these guides aren't intended to be incredibly formal, alignment isn't much of an issue, and more of a personal preference. I like to center the introduction and conclusion, and keep the main body aligned to the left.
Images
A large proportion of guides will often include images or diagrams to demonstrate actions or to provide an illustration or example. When including screenshots, try to crop them so that only the information needed is shown. Indenting images is a good way to make them stand out to the reader, and it's useful to provide some text underneath the image explaining what it shows.
Lists
Much like headings, you should try and keep a consistent style for your lists throughout your guide. Changing list styles within your guide can be confusing and looks messy. An exception to this is when altering between unordered lists and ordered/numbered lists. The easiest way to create lists is to use the feature build into the text editor; but you might want to create your own list if you wanted to use different characters to indicate a new element in the list, or if you wanted to alter the spacing.
That's about it for this guide. I hope it helped you in some way. If you have any feedback, criticism or would like me to address any errors in my guide, feel free to reply to this thread. Below, I've left some links if you'd like to further your text formatting skills. Thank you for reading.
About text formatting - Wikipedia article on formatted text that leads to some good pages on the topic.
