How do you quote people here?

November 20, 2004 5:59 AM

Newbie Question: How the in the world do you quote someone - or at least how can you use italics in posting here? Thanx in advance...
posted by fairmettle to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

There's a little button that says I at the bottom of the comment window. You can use that, or just write your own HTML:

<I>This is the text that I want italicized</I>

results in:

This is the text that I want italicized

Another way to quote someone, especially longer quotes, is to use the <blockquote> and </blockquote> tags, which will indent your text.

btw, this thread is full of people who can help you with Mefi posting questions. I'm one of them, even though I didn't post there.
posted by PrinceValium at 6:12 AM on November 20, 2004

As a friendly reminder, the page on which you entered this question contains the following text in large bold letters: "Make sure it's not MetaFilter, MetaTalk, or Ask MetaFilter related, as those posts would best be posted in MetaTalk than here."
posted by majick at 6:25 AM on November 20, 2004

Response by poster: Thank-you good Prince!

I was stuck on the old square bracket meme...
posted by fairmettle at 6:28 AM on November 20, 2004

Response by poster: As a friendly reminder, the page on which you entered this question contains the following text in large bold letters: "Make sure it's not MetaFilter, MetaTalk, or Ask MetaFilter related, as those posts would best be posted in MetaTalk than here."

Oops... I'll have to fall back on the newbie-defence this time - there's so many meta's around here, it'll take me a bit to get it straight in my head. But never fear, I aim to be a good forum soldier and follow the rules...

Thanx for the heads up.
posted by fairmettle at 6:40 AM on November 20, 2004 [1 favorite]

Basically, you do that stuff the same way you do it on any Web page. And if you see something you want to do but don't know how to do, you do the same thing you do any other time that happens -- View Source and see how they did it.

On MetaFilter, there is a caveat to using BLOCKQUOTE. Since MetaFilter automatically converts blank lines to BR tags, but BLOCKQUOTE adds its own vertical space, you need to run the BLOCKQUOTE and its text into the surrounding paragraphs (if any) to avoid huge vertical gaps in your posts.

Such as how I did it here -- View Source to see.
posted by kindall at 7:17 AM on November 20, 2004

Welcome fairmettle!

I asked a similar question on MetaTalk a while back (as I'm a relative newbie too) and I guess you can't view the quick tools either :D There's an excellent HTML cheat sheet in the responses that I've created as a handy document on my desktop.
posted by floanna at 7:30 AM on November 20, 2004 [1 favorite]