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Markup help

On many occasions while contributing to SciPost, one has to fill in a text-based field in a web form. For many reasons, it is desirable to give structure to what one writes. We offer markup facilities to enable you to do this.

We support three options:

Each of these supports LaTeX via MathJax, though the precise semantics varies from one option to the other.

Which should you choose? This is mostly a question of personal preference. To help you decide, here is a quick summary of main points to bear in mind:
OptionAdvantagesDisadvantages
Plain text
  • Simplicity
  • No markup!
Markdown
  • ease of use
  • provides more or less all the markup you'll ever need, at least for small snippets
  • non-standardized: many dozen "dialects" exist
  • not really meant for large, complex documents
reStructuredText
  • relative ease of use
  • standardized: the language is well-defined and stable
  • it's the standard documentation language for Python; Sphinx uses ReST files as input
  • ReST files are easily exportable to other formats such as HTML, LaTeX etc.
  • support for maths is good, but remains less extensive than in LaTeX

Which option you choose is completely up to you. Our system will determine which one you are using and render your input accordingly.

Plain text

See our plain text-specific help page

Markdown

See our Markdown-specific help page

reStructuredText

See our reStructuredText-specific help page

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