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MatrixDev - - (+6|-0)
Matrixdown documentation(self)
2 commentsbyx0x7

What is Matrixdown

Matrixdown is an extention to Markdown. Markdown is a common post format. If you want the quick basics on how to use markdown you might check out these two pages:

Matrixdown extends this further with features that are specific to this forum. It also modifies a few of the behaviors in the standard extended syntax. For example, the output generated by inline image in Matrixdown will also link to the image.

The features

Below are most of the features Matrixdown supports and guides for how to use them. Most features use "matrixdown commands" which use an exclamation point. But there are a few exceptions.

!IMG

This acts as an easier way to do inline images.
Example:
!IMG image-url

!IMGLINK

I mentioned before that inline images will link to themselves. But what if you want to link to something else. This is what the !IMGLINK command is for.

Example:
!IMGLINK img-url target-url

You can also do it over more than one line
!IMGLINK
img-url
target-url

!ARTICLEIMG

This one is for the bloggers out there. 'Matrix posts can be viewed as posts or as blog articles. Sometime a feature image can look nice in a blog post. But depending on the post it can look out of place when viewed as a post. So the !ARTICLEIMG command let's you add a graphic that is only visible when viewing it as an article. It's syntax function exactly the same as a standard !IMG command.

!ARTICLEIMG https://example.com/image.png

Polls

Polls can be embedded anywhere in a post or comment. They aren't a seperate post type like on some other sites. Creating a poll is straight forward.

!POLL
Option 1
Option 2
Option 3

The poll ends on the first blank line. You can also re-use polls across posts and comments. When a poll is created it will be replaced by a poll id. This is easy to see if you edit the comment or post. The syntax you see when doing so can be reused anywhere that uses Matrixdown.

!POLL 23

One nice thing about polls here is that because they allow downvotes and multiple votes, they avoid a lot of the flaws with voting system with many options. And it's even better than they are easy to make.

Time objects with !TIME

There are two good reasons to use a time object. One is if you want to display a relative time. '1 day ago', 'in 5 minutes'. The other is if you want to translate a time to the reader's timezone.

!TIME {time data} [relative|absolute] format

Format can take a date format string or one of three shortcuts: long, short, timetz.

Example:
!TIME {2/28/2026 20:00 EST} absolute timetz

Output:

Example:
!TIME {1772592517023} relative

Output:

Diceroll with !D

Warning. This one has a small danger. You cannot edit your post if you use it to prevent re-rolling.

Side benefit: You can use it as a proof of locking a post.

If I'm lucky I'll roll a natural 20.

!D20 = 14

How did I do?

Gvid embed with !GV

This will embed a gvid video.

Example:
!GV HHbiMJpv

You can also use it to embed Youtube videos since Gvid supports Youtube ids.

Strawpoll embeds

This was added before 'Matrix had its own polling system. But you can embed polls made on strawpoll.com

!SP poll_id

Escaping Matrixdown commands

Simply place a front slash in front of a command in order to prevent it from rendering. \!SOMECOMMAND

Commenting out content

If you want to leave a comment for yourself inside the edit form but not have it display, you can use this.

:::comment
My commmented out content
:::

Spoilers

You can make it so text is hidden until hovered over. There are two different ways to do it. An inline spoiler, and a block spoiler.

The inline spoiler is done with two exclamation marks. 

!!spoiler!!

spoiler

The block spoiler is wraps a larger section of text in a block using triple colon ::: followed by the spoiler type. 

::: spoiler

This text will  
be hidden  
over multiple lines  

:::

This text is hidden until hover over
It lasts for many lines, or paragraphs

Have fun playing around with these features. More are certain to come.

Comment preview

[-]JasonCarswell1(+1|0)

Thank you!!!

I'd forgotten a bunch of stuff.
It's been a long while since I did tables or anything fancy.
Images will be great to use.

A little confused, figuring stuff out...

Three dashes makes a line. But three equals does nothing with an empty line above it.

===

Header

... is made like this (cancelled out with \) with text in the line above ===:

Header
===

Indents are four spaces.

  • first bullet *

    • second = 4 spaces + *, on the next line, yet double-space is added
      third = 4 spaces indents without bullet, further in, with bullet above, single-space

    This is 4 spaces indented without line directly above, not further in.

A line.
This is 4 spaces not indented with a line directly above. 

This is 4 spaces unstyled without a line directly above.

Escaping Matrixdown commands is good when links have brackets.
ie. Movie_Title_(film) needs [Movie Title](http://Wikipedia.org/wiki/Movie_Title_\(film\))

: MediaWiki indents with a colon, but not here. They're used for comment-outs.
<!-- MediaWiki and SaidIt CSS would comment out this, but not here. -->

I've struggled (much before now) to just indent without bullets or numbers.
Seems like bullets must to be involved to indent.

parentlinkreply
[-]x0x70(0|0)

I do have html support turned off. Your last version of commenting out content is actually html. I do that for security purposes. I could try to double check everything but without an employee to task with it for a week I could never be sure everything is covered to prevent running a script tag in some indirect way.

There are a few ways I can think of to indent. Markdown doesn't support pure indentation, but other features can be used.

You could use a blockquote
It might be good enough
thought it does put a box around things

That uses the ">" character.

Similarly there is a code block 

Is this a good indentation?

I've realized the fancy formatting, Prisma is carrying that. And to get it you have to specify the language of the code block.

```bash
more content
```

And last there is using non-breaking space.

        This is indented

To do the last one you repeat this without the quotes or spaces "& nbsp;" several times. You could also use unicode to achieve it. That gives you fine grained control over the indentation level. In that case it was 8 of them.

parentlinkreply