Synchronet Message Markup

Synchronet¹⁾ can optionally recognize and apply simple text “style codes” to displayed messages. These markup codes are called 'StyleCodes' in GoldEd, 'Rich Text' in SemPoint, 'Structured Text' in Mozilla/Thunderbird, and 'Synchronet Message Markup' in Synchronet.

The supported Synchronet Message Markup styles/codes are:

• *bold*
• /italics/
• _underlined_
• #inverse#

ANSI-BBS clients do not traditionally support italics and underlined text, so those styles may be represented with combinations of high intensity and blinking text attributes and/or alternate fonts (e.g. when using SyncTERM).

Since the markup codes themselves are simple ASCII characters (*, /, _, and #) that could easily conflict with other valid uses of those characters, rules about their use have been defined to avoid the parsing and stylizing of text that was not intentionally stylized.

1. Marked-up text cannot span more than one paragraph, i.e. a blank line will terminate the forward-lookup for a closing markup code.
2. Marked-up text cannot be nested, i.e. you cannot combine styles /*like this*/.
3. Marked-up text cannot be adjacent to other marked-up text, i.e. you cannot *do*/this/.
4. If there is any text preceding marked-up text, the preceding character must be either white-space or a non-alphanumeric character.
5. If there is any text following marked-up text, the following character must be either white-space or a non-alphanumeric character.

In Synchronet, the recognition and application of Message Markup Codes may be enabled/disabled/configured on a per-sub-board (message area) basis. The default new sub-board configuration is to parse and apply the effects of Markup Codes in displayed message text, but not display the codes themselves (hide them from view).

When the parsing/display of the Markup Codes is enabled in the configuration, the sysop has the additional option to hide (not display) the Markup Codes themselves. If “false positives” is a problem (the unintended stylization of messages), rather than completely disabling the feature, showing the Markup Codes in combination with the stylized text may provide a good compromise.

Currently, only the display of messages in the Terminal server supports Markup Codes.

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