Bio Formatting

In any situation where text is the main mode of communication, clear, tidy presentation is as important as the content itself. Without it, a perfectly good passage, post or description becomes incoherent and, in some cases, impossible to read.

The aim of this guide is to demonstrate how basic formatting tags can be used to give your character bios more impact – making them easy to read and understand.

Cul Sor Name: Cul Sor Species: Human Occupation: Swordswoman (Professional Antagonist) Age: 28 Height: 5' 10" Weight: 185lb Description: Cul Sor possesses the wild qualities that would normally be described as "Amazonian". Her near-black hair is long and loose, braided here and there as though infested with ebony snakes. Her skin is pale, though not unnervingly so. Her face would be charming enough given proper care; her eyes are dark brown, her cheek bones well-formed, her lips are full and her nose is proud and prominent. Cul Sor is tall and statuesque, having a muscular build which is not entirely concealed beneath her brown leather bodice and britches. From her clothing hangs various small trophies and items: a long yellowed tooth, a gorgon's snake (now dried and withered), a small decorated feather, and a blowing dart. Four lateral bars have been tattooed upon her left shoulder, one above the other, growing in thickness from bottom to top. About her right wrist is a band formed of three coloured threads, wound about three times and held in place by a tooth. Cul Sol's primary source of income comes from being employed as a "Professional Antagonist," which is something akin to a mercenary but requiring a little more wit. Cul Sor's job is to identify those who support the enemy of her employer and simply rile them. Sometimes she will cause riots, other times grand rumours which are intended to lead to the downfall of a monarch or ruler. Her role, and her expertise in it, require her to wear many caps: peasant, politician, diplomat, noble. As such, Cul is something of a social chameleon; she is able to meet and mix with almost any class of people. She knows how to dress, how to vary her speech, and how to greet and vary her manners in order to accomplish her goals. The description above is Cul Sor in her natural state. Once she assumes her role, she dresses accordingly.

What you see is part of a perfectly functional bio; it tells readers all the important information that they'd need and thus it does its job. However, it's difficult to read; there are no headings or paragraphs, some parts don't even make sense at all, and it's easy to lose your eye from line to line. So, while the text – the words themselves – accomplish exactly what it needs to, namely telling you about this character's appearance, it's unlikely to be read by anyone simply because the formatting makes it very hard for people to read.

Let's first start by breaking it into paragraphs. There are two ways of doing this, "" and " ". "" inserts a full line, while " " drops the text that follows onto the line below. Using these tags, it's easy to form headings and paragraphs.

Cul Sor 
Name: Cul Sor 
Species: Human 
Occupation: Swordswoman (Professional Antagonist) 
Age: 28 
Height: 5' 10" 
Weight: 185lb 

Description: 
Cul Sor possesses the wild qualities that would normally be described as "Amazonian". Her near-black hair is long and loose, braided here and there as though infested with ebony snakes. Her skin is pale, though not unnervingly so. Her face would be charming enough given proper care; her eyes are dark brown, her cheek bones well-formed, her lips are full and her nose is proud and prominent.

Cul Sor is tall and statuesque, having a muscular build that is not entirely concealed beneath her brown leather bodice and britches. From her clothing hangs various small trophies and items: a long yellowed tooth, a gorgon's snake (now dried and withered), a small decorated feather, and a blowing dart.

Four lateral bars have been tattooed upon her left shoulder, one above the other, growing in thickness from bottom to top. About her right wrist is a band formed of three coloured threads, wound about three times and held in place by a tooth.

Cul Sol's primary source of income comes from being employed as a "Professional Antagonist," which is something akin to a mercenary but requiring a little more wit. Cul Sor's job is to identify those who support the enemy of her employer and simply rile them. Sometimes she will cause riots, other times grand rumours which are intended to lead to the downfall of a monarch or ruler.

Her role, and her expertise in it, requires her to wear many caps: peasant, politician, diplomat, noble. As such, Cul is something of a social chameleon; she is able to meet and mix with almost any class of people. She knows how to dress, how to vary her speech, and how to greet and vary her manners in order to accomplish her goals. The description above is Cul Sor in her natural state. Once she assumes her role, she dresses accordingly.

Already we can see how some well-placed breaks and lines can make a tremendous difference; the body of text is broken up into sections that are much easier to read; the headings at the top now look like headings. Already, your bio is much more likely to be read by other people.

Another method of separating sections is the "<hr>" command. This creates a horizontal line which, literally, forms a break between passages. Thus sections such as "Background", "Description", "Personality" and so on can be separated. However, too many of these lines can be untidy. People use this command more commonly to break between the text part of a bio and the section below it that features links and images.

Basic Text Effects ( and )

While the bio now looks fine, there is more that could be done, should you wish to. This is more specific formatting, using commands that alter the text itself, lending new significance to certain words or making headings and categories absolutely clear.

To really understand how these effects should be used, take a moment to scroll through this document that you're currently reading. Look how the text has been broken into clearly defined sections, all of the with clear, stand-out headings which not only breaks up the text but also draws your eye. It's easy to find the specific section you're looking for – and that's exactly how bold text should be used. While italics are used to placed emphasis upon a single word, bold text is used to highlight the start of new sections.

For example, let's take the headings from the top of our sample bio. It's already easy to see what is a heading and what is not. But to make the overall appearance of the text look more interesting to a casual glance, to highlight certain points of interest or new sections, we have two more commands that can be used; "" (bold text) and "" (Italics).

The only thing to remember while using these tags is that you need to "close" them when you don't want that specific effect on your text anymore, otherwise you'll find your entire body of text from the tag forward will be effected.

Cul Sor
Name: Cul Sor
Species: Human
Occupation: Swordswoman (Professional Antagonist)
Age: 28
Height: 5' 10"
Weight: 185lb

Description:
Cul Sor possesses the wild qualities that would normally be…

Center (<center>)

To give your bio a tidy, balanced appearance, you may want to use the <center> command. This can be used to center both text and images, and creates a smoother overall appearance. As with and , you need to close your tags after centering the required object, otherwise everything afterwards will be centered, too.

Let's look at our headings on our sample bio again…

<center>Cul Sor</center>
Name: Cul Sor
Species: Human
Occupation: Swordswoman (Professional Antagonist)
Age: 28
Height: 5' 10"
Weight: 185lb

Description:
Cul Sor possesses the wild qualities that would normally be…

Pictures

Many people use images in their bios; they demonstrate how a character looks far more concisely than words do. The trouble comes when too many pictures are posted, taking the place of the text. It's generally a good idea to put your images after your text, letting people reference specific character details before they get to the general idea of how you mean your character to look.

There are several ways of getting a picture into your bio; you can embed it into your bio so that it's displayed with your text, you can have a link that displays the picture when you click it, or you can have a link that will open the image in a new window when clicked. Lots of images, especially large ones, might take people with slower connections longer to load (another reason to locate them at the base of your bio), so it's often advisable to display a single picture and link to any others you may want to use.

<img src=http://www.yourURLhere.com> will display your picture in your bio.

<a href=http://www.yourURLhere.com>Put your text here</a> will display the underlined text between the <a> and </a> tags as a link.

<a href="http://www.yourURLhere.com" target="_blank">Put your text here</a> will display the underlined text between the <a> and </a> tags as a link that will open in a new window.

Resizing Images.

Quite often you'll find the perfect picture for your bio, but it will be enormous – much too big to be used. This isn't a problem! It's possible to resize images, all you need to know is how big they are to begin with.

To find out how big your image is (for IE users), right-click your chosen image and choose "Properties". Then it's simply a question of rescaling. The trick comes in knowing how to keep the ratio between height and width even.

Thus if your image is 1576 x 2045 and you wish to rescale it down by a third, you need to do a little math here.

1576 can be rounded up to 1600 without too much trouble, and, likewise, 2045 can be rounded down to 2000. Both numbers are divisible by 4, which gives us a ratio of 4:5. As long as we maintain this height:width ratio, we can rescale the image to any size we like. Therefore, 1576 x2045 becomes 1000:1250, and now we've got the new dimensions for the picture, we can use the resizing command.

<img src="http://www.yourURLhere.com" width="1250" height="1000">

Font Effects (; )

Sometimes it's helpful to be able to alter the colour of your font, the size of it, even the font itself. When used carefully in bios, this can be an especially useful tool though, be warned, too many font effects will dazzle the reader much in the same way that no formatting at all will confuse them and dull their enthusiasm for reading your bio.

Again, it's important to remember to close your tags when you want the text effect to end, otherwise the new format will effect the rest of your bio.

 alters the size of your font; it's wise to play around a little with this one; fonts come in various sizes, thus Ariel at size 5 may be illegibly small, while Times New Roman will read perfectly well.

 changes the colour of your font. This six-key color code is known as "hex", and various colour pickers are available online. Try here, http://www.hypersolutions.org/pages/colorSel.html for an easy-to-use hex color picker. Hex offers a more specific choice of colour; for a more general choice, you can replace the hex code with the name of the colour you wish to change to; red, orange, blue, green and so on.

 will alter the font that your bio's text is written in. Shards has many different fonts, but compiling a list of these is tricky; much of it depends on what your browser has installed. The best way to find out which ones are available to you is to play around with fonts in your word processor and discover which fonts you like the best. Then it's simply a matter of copying the name of your favourite font into the "" within the font face tags.

Should you choose a font that you (or any other reader of your bio) doesn't have installed, the text will be displayed in Times New Roman.

Other Text Effects (, , )

Finally, there are a few other effects which you can use, which haven't yet been mentioned in this guide. This includes effects to underline your text, superscripting and subscripting. These are finer points and are rarely used, but, as with other parts of this guide, it's as much a matter of personal preference which you use and where you use them. A good general guide is to use these – and other effects – as sparingly as possible.

 will cause the text between the tags to be underlined.

<s> will create a strike through the text between the <s> and </s> tags.

 will create a superscript effect, useful for TM symbols, dates and so on.

 will enable a subscript effect, useful for small text as is used to indicate whispering and so on.

Cul Sor
Name: Cul Sor
Species: Human
Occupation: Swordswoman (Professional Antagonist)
Age: 28
Height: 5' 10"
Weight: 185lb

Description
Cul Sor possesses the wild qualities that would normally be described as "Amazonian". Her near-black hair is long and loose, braided here and there as though infested with ebony snakes. Her skin is pale, though not unnervingly so. Her face would be charming enough given proper care; her eyes are dark brown, her cheek bones well-formed, her lips are full and her nose is proud and prominent.

Cul Sor is tall and statuesque, having a muscular build that is not entirely concealed beneath her brown leather bodice and britches. From her clothing hangs various small trophies and items: a long yellowed tooth, a gorgon's snake (now dried and withered), a small decorated feather, and a blowing dart.

Four lateral bars have been tattooed upon her left shoulder, one above the other, growing in thickness from bottom to top. About her right wrist is a band formed of three coloured threads, wound about three times and held in place by a tooth.

Cul Sol's primary source of income comes from being employed as a "Professional Antagonist," which is something akin to a mercenary but requiring a little more wit. Cul Sor's job is to identify those who support the enemy of her employer and simply rile them. Sometimes she will cause riots, other times grand rumours which are intended to lead to the downfall of a monarch or ruler.

Her role, and her expertise in it, requires her to wear many caps: peasant, politician, diplomat, noble. As such, Cul is something of a social chameleon; she is able to meet and mix with almost any class of people. She knows how to dress, how to vary her speech, and how to greet and vary her manners in order to accomplish her goals. The description above is Cul Sor in her natural state. Once she assumes her role, she dresses accordingly.

It's easy to see how, when correctly used, these basic HTML formatting tags can radically improve the appearance of any bio, giving your text a smooth, professional look that encourages people to read what you have taken the time to write in the first place.

Good luck and have fun!

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Bio Formatting

Paragraphs and Line-Breaks (<br> and <p>)

Basic Text Effects (<b> and <I>)

Center (<center>)

Pictures

Resizing Images.

Font Effects (<font size="">; <font colour="">)

Other Text Effects (<u>, <sup>, <sub>)

And Finally