Wikisource cheat sheet

There are common bits of formatting you have to do in Wikisource; this is a list of ones beginners will likely come up against. Most take the form of templates, inside {{double curly brackets}}. You can nest one inside the other but do keep count of the number of brackets because if you leave one off weird things will happen.

Wikisource measures everything in ems; an em is a unit equal to the point size of the font, about the width of a capital M.

Paragraph formatting and spacing

Effect	Template	Notes
Line break	<br />	Don’t do this to make a break between paragraphs, just press Return twice.
Space	{{em}}	A one-em space between words.
Bigger space	{{gap}}	A bigger space. Don’t worry about trying to replicate the spacing in a Wikisource scan, though, it’s not the point.
Paragraph space	{{dhr}} {{dhr|3em}}	A double-height row, and you can specify the gap. Again, no need to replicate white space in an e-book.
Right align	{{right|sampletext}} {{right|sampletext|2em}}	You can specify the distance from the right margin.
Centre	{{c|sampletext}}

Typography

H⸻	H{{longdash}}	Enclose this in a {{nowrap| }} to stop it breaking across lines
Larger	{{larger|Text}} {{x-larger|Text}}	Goes up to {{xxxx-larger| }}
Smaller	{{smaller|Text}}	Down to {{xxxx-smaller| }}
Small block	{{smaller block/s}} {{smaller block/e}}	Put these templates before and after the block of text you want to make smaller.
Smaller, tighter text	{{fine block/s}} {{fine block/e}}	As above. Good for quoted text.
Small caps	{{sc|Heading}}	Note that only lower case letters will be converted to small capitals.
Hung punctuation	{{fqm|“}}	This floats an initial quotation mark into the left margin (which is good typography).
Drop cap	{{dropinitial|D}}as Text	Makes a two-line dropped initial capital.
Gothic/blackletter font	{{blackletter|  Das Text}}	Fraktur fancy text
Size, colour etc	{{font-size|130% |style=color:#555051|Text}}	Makes larger grey text

Ornamental Rules

Rule	{{rule}} {{rule|10em}}	Makes a basic black line. You can tweak the length.
Wiggly line	{{custom rule|w|40|w|40|w|40}}	Three 40-em wiggles, so 120 ems total.
Row of bullets	{{***|5|4em|char=•}}	Or any line of spaced characters across the page: see help.
	{{custom rule|sp|40|fy1|40|sp|40}}	See the {{custom rule}} help for how to generate fancy-pants rules.

Headers

Basic running head	{{rh||BIRTH OF WESTLAND.|4|}}	The pipes separate the left-aligned, centred, and right-aligned.
Left/right running heads	{{rvh|56|Chapter Title|Book Title}}	Puts the page number and title or chapter in the correct spots: see help.

Words

Typo	{{SIC|typed word|presumed word}}	Use this for actual typos, not for former spellings.
Start of hyphenated word (ad-)	{{hws|ad|admirable}}	Only used if the last word on the page is hyphenated…
End of hyphenated word (-mirable)	{{hwe|mirable|admirable}}	…so the word joins up properly across page breaks.
Paragraph ends coincides with page end	{{nop}}	Use when a paragraph ends at the bottom of the page, to stop it being joined to the next page’s text.
Reference in text	<ref>Op. cit. p.11</ref>	Need to put {{smallrefs}} in the footer as well

Poetry

{{block center|
{{smaller|
{{fqm}}And forth there stretched a silent land—<br />
For distance robbed mine ear of sound—<br />
League after league from the near strand<br />
To giant peaks that, band by band,<br />
Marched past the vision’s outmost bound.”
}}
}}

(There are actual <poem></poem> tags, but Wikisource people prefer this method. The <poem> tags work well for formatting a list of people or ingredients, though.)

Tip: apply typographic formatting first, them enclose it in positioning/spacing formatting, like the poem above.