Original thread here:
Mind you - the original thread makes reference to website bios, which no longer exist. So I stripped out those references when pasting the meat of this article here. I've tested some of the basic formatting myself and confirmed that at least the Paragraph and line spacing works to make Paragraphs instead of wall-of-text bios that other people can read properly.
Preface
This seems to be a relatively unknown feature of Champions Online: searching the forums provides very little useful information, most character bios are un-formatted or incorrectly formatted with normal line breaks, and I often see players lamenting the lack of formatting options. I wasn't even aware it was possible, either, until I got the idea to try a basic HTML tag (). Afterwards, I found a recent forum post by Lexeme that confirmed that other tags would work, so I decided to do some testing.
This post contains the results of that testing, along with examples of how to use this information. I will be updating this post with additional information on additional markup as (if) it is discovered. Hopefully this information will be useful for the creation of more readable character bios.
How Formatting Works
The input box used to edit your character bio is a rudimentary text editor, similar to Notepad. It does no formatting of its own and shows every line break, space, and any HTML markup as it was typed. This is useful but misleading, because the bio is parsed as HTML in the in-game bio (via right clicking a player portrait and choosing "Info") which means they ignore the line breaks and spacing the player uses and sees in his or her bio entry area. The character bio has a limit of 2000 characters, and HTML formatting is included in the limit.
Valid Markup
All markup that was tested and verified to be valid in-game. Each is listed with example use and explanations of any unusual behaviour.
Paragraphs: Enclose paragraphs between a and
tag to keep blocks of text separated.
Example: First block of text goes here
Second block of text[/i]
Line Breaks: Use the
tag to force line breaks without the extra spacing that adds.
Example: Line one
Line two
line three
Bold and Italics: Text between and will be italicised, and text between and will be in bold. Underline does not work for some reason.
Example: Text emphasised with italics and text emphasised with bold
Color: Achieved using the tag with the "color" attribute. Color can be described as a valid HTML color name (reference: http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_colornames.asp) or an RGB hex value (#FF00FF). Font tag ignores the size attribute.
Example: Text in magenta by name
Example: Same colour by RGB value
Unordered Lists (universal): Unordered lists is one of the most surprising features to work. An unordered list is enclosed in
Example:
Character Entities (universal): Used to print reserved characters such as < and >. < prints prints >, and & prints &, for example. Another common one is to force spacing (untested but should work). Reference: http://www.w3schools.com/HTML/html_entities.asp
Mind you - the original thread makes reference to website bios, which no longer exist. So I stripped out those references when pasting the meat of this article here. I've tested some of the basic formatting myself and confirmed that at least the Paragraph and line spacing works to make Paragraphs instead of wall-of-text bios that other people can read properly.
Preface
This seems to be a relatively unknown feature of Champions Online: searching the forums provides very little useful information, most character bios are un-formatted or incorrectly formatted with normal line breaks, and I often see players lamenting the lack of formatting options. I wasn't even aware it was possible, either, until I got the idea to try a basic HTML tag (). Afterwards, I found a recent forum post by Lexeme that confirmed that other tags would work, so I decided to do some testing.
This post contains the results of that testing, along with examples of how to use this information. I will be updating this post with additional information on additional markup as (if) it is discovered. Hopefully this information will be useful for the creation of more readable character bios.
How Formatting Works
The input box used to edit your character bio is a rudimentary text editor, similar to Notepad. It does no formatting of its own and shows every line break, space, and any HTML markup as it was typed. This is useful but misleading, because the bio is parsed as HTML in the in-game bio (via right clicking a player portrait and choosing "Info") which means they ignore the line breaks and spacing the player uses and sees in his or her bio entry area. The character bio has a limit of 2000 characters, and HTML formatting is included in the limit.
Valid Markup
All markup that was tested and verified to be valid in-game. Each is listed with example use and explanations of any unusual behaviour.
Paragraphs: Enclose paragraphs between a and
tag to keep blocks of text separated.
Example: First block of text goes here
Second block of text[/i]
Line Breaks: Use the
tag to force line breaks without the extra spacing that adds.
Example: Line one
Line two
line three
Bold and Italics: Text between and will be italicised, and text between and will be in bold. Underline does not work for some reason.
Example: Text emphasised with italics and text emphasised with bold
Color: Achieved using the tag with the "color" attribute. Color can be described as a valid HTML color name (reference: http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_colornames.asp) or an RGB hex value (#FF00FF). Font tag ignores the size attribute.
Example: Text in magenta by name
Example: Same colour by RGB value
Unordered Lists (universal): Unordered lists is one of the most surprising features to work. An unordered list is enclosed in
- and
Example:
- First Item
- Second Item
- Third Item
Character Entities (universal): Used to print reserved characters such as < and >. < prints prints >, and & prints &, for example. Another common one is to force spacing (untested but should work). Reference: http://www.w3schools.com/HTML/html_entities.asp