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A Guide to Bio Formatting
Archived Post
Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
Character Bio Formatting with HTML
Preface
This seems to be a relatively unknown feature of Champions Online: searching the forums provides very little useful information, most character bios are unformatted 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 (<p>). Afterwards, I found a recent forum post by Lexeme (here) 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 both the in-game bio (via right clicking a player portrait and choosing "Info" [1]) and the website one (found on the CO website [2]), 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[3], and HTML formatting is included in the limit[4].A bio's formatting is slightly different if it is viewed in-game or via the site because the in-game parser accepts more markup than the site bio. Nothing you do will make the site bio look good, so don't bother; it strips out nearly all useful tags and gives you a giant block of text.
Valid Markup
All markup that was tested and verified to be valid either in-game or on the website bio. Each is listed with example use and explanations of any unusual behaviour.- Paragraphs (in-game only): Enclose paragraphs between a <p> and </p> tag to keep blocks of text separated.
Example: <p>First block of text goes here</p> <p>Second block of text</i>
- Line Breaks (in-game only): Use the <br> tag to force line breaks without the extra spacing that <p> adds.
Example: Line one<br> Line two<br> line three<br>
- Bold and Italics (in-game only): Text between <i> and </i> will be italicised, and text between <b> and </b> will be in bold. Underline does not work for some reason.
Example: <i>Text emphasised with italics</i> and <b>text emphasised with bold</b>
- Colour (in-game only): Achieved using the <font> tag with the "color" attribute. Colour can be described as a valid HTML colour name (reference: http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_colornames.asp) or an RGB hex value (#FF00FF). Font tag ignores the size attribute.
Example: <font color="magenta">Text in magenta by name</font>
Example: <font color="#FF00FF">Same colour by RGB value</font> - Unordered Lists (universal): Unordered lists is one of the most surprising features to work, and strangely, it's one of the only ones to work on the site bio. An unordered list is enclosed in <ul> and </ul>, and individual list items are enclosed in <li> and </li>. Appears as bulleted lists on the website, while the game uses asterisks (*) for bullets. Ordered (numbered) lists do not seem to be supported.
Example:
<ul>
<li>First Item</li>
<li>Second Item</li>
<li>tThird Item</li>
</ul> - Anchors (website only): You can provide links to character art or more detailed profiles, but only on the website bio. Links are parsed but not displayed in-game. Format is <a href="http://address.goes/here">Link Name</a> (note the http:, which is mandatory to link off-site).
Example: <a href="http://google.com">Google!</a>. In-game this just prints "Google!", but on the website bio will provide a clickable link to visit google.com.
- 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
Broken or Invalid Markup
Other tags I tested that did not work at all are as follows: <hr>, <u>, <sup>, <sub>, <font size=7>, <h1> (<h2>, <h3>, etc.), <pre>, <ol>, and <center>. The <img> tag, suprisingly, seems to work in-game, but only draws a small white square and does not accept image URLs.
Formatting Examples
Gadgette (Unformatted) - by stjobeIf anyone else would like to contribute example screenshots for this section, post them and I'll gladly add them to the list.
Footnotes
- You can see how your bio looks to other players in-game by targeting yourself (via hotkey or /target_self) and then typing /target_info. (Contributed by spaz115)
- Most easily found via http:/ /www.champions-online.com/character_profiles/user_characters/playerHandleHere, which lists a player's characters. (example)
- Contributed by Exorthian
- Tested by AngelOfCaine
Post edited by Archived Post on
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Comments
Impact wasn't my first choice for the headings, I promise. I've never liked it much, but it's the only one that seems to stand out well against the text. I tried using Arial Black but it was too small; it's too bad there isn't a way to modify font size on the forum.
If I get a lot of complaints I'll see if I can find a better way to format the whole thing.
Have a cookie! *passes cookies*
Second, does anyone know if there's a way to view your bio as others see it? Everything I've tried just gives me the HTML-ized version, and, of course, the web version looks like aged rodent droppings, regardless. It'd be nice to be able to see how it looks to someone else in order to decide on tweaks -- maybe my name looks better in fuchsia than magenta, hard to decide if you can't see how it looks to others.
Third, anyone have any idea why the web version just regurgitates letters, sans formatting, like some sort of old school typewriter with a broken carriage return key? Forget (sadly) Web2.0 and HTML5, I'd settle for just having line breaks.
Lastly (and, yeah, I know, no one reading this can likely answer) is there any hope whatsoever of getting at least the web description fixed?
1. Glad it helps, that was precisely the reason I wrote it. Formatting information has been really scarce. Hopefully it will end up stickied so it can be found easier, but I don't know what one has to do to get a thread stickied, and don't think I should request it anyway (seems tacky for me to ask)
2. Only way I know of is to get somebody to take a screenshot and send it to you, unfortunately. That's what I had to do to test the tags, in fact.
The good news is the colours seem to be pretty consistent with what you'd expect, so you can get a fairly good idea of how it will look by opening notepad (or your preferred text editor), putting the bio in it, and saving the file as HTML (just add .html extension). View it in a browser and you'll have a pretty good idea of how it's going to look, except for the font being different.
If you want, you can fake the font by setting it to Comic Sans, which will give you the same basic feel and have similar font weight as the game font. To do that, enclose the whole thing in <font face="Comic Sans"> and </font> tags, but don't forget to remove them when you put it in-game. I may decide to add a note about this to the main post, but it doesn't really fit with the theme of the rest of it, so I'm not sure if I should.
(I should probably test if font changing works in the bio...I didn't bother because I it didn't seem likely, but now it's going to bug me until I do it.)
3. It has different rules for stripping out tags than the game client. It's probably tied to their content management system and is done to prevent breaking the site design or something. It's annoying, but it could be worse. As a workaround, you could host your formatted bio somewhere else on the web (there are CO-related sites dedicated to this, I believe) and provide a clickable link using the <a> tag. It's kind of kludgy, but it's better than nothing and it won't interfere with the in-game bio, since it will just appear as unclickable text there.
---
Funny thing about the web colour names: the names "magenta" and "fuchsia" both translate to #FF00FF for some reason. I know it was just a random example, but it amused me because I originally wrote the example using 'color=fucshia' but changed it to magenta because they were identical and it matched the forum's naming. I tend to just use hex values directly because of weird crap like this
Thing is, I didn't know the way it looked in my 'box' wasn't the way it looked everywhere else. My stomach dropped when I found out, I've spent a lot of times getting my bios just 'right' and I feel kind of shamed knowing that other people have just viewed them as a block of text, haha.
Damnit...
Oh well, would be nice if Cryptic could add some way of viewing how it looks on someone else's computer
Confirmed.
You sir, are a genius.
Thank you so much.
I never bothered with formatting my bio because if I couldn't see it too I didn't care.
That is about to change big style.
And someone should post example screen shots of their super duper super hero bios :cool:
Didn't know you could do that, thanks. I added a note to the guide.
Unfortunately I have no way to do this myself. I recently moved and the internet where I am now is terrible, so I can't play or even keep CO patched up reliably
I guess if someone else wants to post a screenshot or two with all the formatting as seen in-game I could add a link and a note.
Good idea. The guide was entirely for the benefit of others that have more use of it than I do, so it would be fun to see what people do with the formatting.
Ironically, I haven't had much reason to use the information for my own characters' bios. I try to keep them around a paragraph in length to discourage myself from adding unnecessary detail, which means they rarely need anything more than an occasional line break.
Thanks to both of you for that, it would be a shame for the guide to end up lost in the archives somewhere.
That is all.
1. Why isn't this stickied?
2. What's the character limit on bios?
I just found out today that you request stickies through the report post feature - it's apparently for more than just pointing out the jerks. I requested it myself since people keep asking about it, but if anyone wants it stickied for easy finding, feel free to request it too, it can't hurt.
I'm glad people are finding and using the info.
Enjoy!
Thank you
Sweet, thanks
Attachment not found.Attachment not found.
Window to the left is what I entered in my Character Info, window on the right is what I see in /target_info while having myself targeted.
Also added a section for sample screenshots and linked to stjobe's attachments (thanks). I'll add more as I get them
Thanks everyone.
It seems, despite my intentions i appear to be contributing to the forums :cool:
Whoda thunk it?
(Thanks Ilazki...)
1) You don't need the opening <p> marking in a paragraph, if all you're using </p> for is to give a double line space. If you put in </p> at the end of a block of text, it'll give you two line breaks before continuing. Useful if you've hit the bio length limit and you need just a few more characters.
2) Your first example has a slight bug in it:
Example: <p>First block of text goes here</p> <p>Second block of text</i>
(should be </p>, not </i> like you have it)
3) You can also use /targetinfo to get a target's bio, as well as /target_info . Not sure why there's two ways to do it, but it's there.
This isn't technically true, the only command for it is /targetinfo but the game doesn't read the _ in the word. This basically means that /targetinfo , /target_info and /t_a_r_g_e_t_i_n_f_o all do the same thing.
The only reason _ are listed are to make the longer commands easier to read.
The tags that I've tested and know works in the /targetinfo window are:
[noparse]<p>, <br>, <b>, <i>, <font color="colourName">, and the character entities < and >[/noparse]
No other HTML tags seem to work any more
If that one's disabled, we might as well not even bother writing bio's anymore :rolleyes:
EDIT: Can we get a Dev to chime in on this? So we know what commands actually work now in our bio's?
I know we can't but whatever : QFT.
Got my bio to look real good on preview mode, but looks awful with /targetinfo...
Thanks for the help Stjobe, modified it a bit, is all good now.
Mostly it just uses paragraph breaks for increased readability. Now, one interesting thing is that I wanted a series of bullet points, but UL and LI actually didn't work, in game it appeared properly, like so:
* One.
* Two.
* Three.
But on the site, it appeared like this:
* One.
*
* Two.
*
* Three.
So, what I did instead was created my own bullet points with asterisks and used the BR tag after each line. Ending the last line with BR twice to maintain the paragraph look of things.
Either way... The UL Codes dont work when People Look at your BIO while in game.... I've tried it ... it still shows up in HTML Format when someone Looks up your Info while in game... When you Look at your own profile.. it looks good... Not to others...
I advise not to use this ... You gotta do it the old fashioned way of * Text</p>* Text</p>*Text... or else it will just look horrible when someone pulls up your info.
Two reasons.
a.) I only use <BR><BR> once. For the lines of my list, I use a single <BR>.
b.) Using <P></P> would create an undesirable blank space between each list entry, and using <P></P> for every list entry is actually many more characters, <BR> is four characters, <P></P> is 7 characters.
So if I do a list like this:
* Entry.<BR>
* Entry.<BR>
* Entry.<BR>
* Final entry.<BR><BR>
I actually economise on characters AND I lose the undesirable blank space between lines. It ends up looking like this:
* Entry.
* Entry.
* Entry.
* Final entry.
However, if I use your method, it requires more characters, like so:
<P>* Entry.</P>
<P>* Entry.</P>
<P>* Entry.</P>
<P>* Final entry.</P>
The result of this is:
* Entry.
* Entry.
* Entry.
* Final entry.
Having black lines like that in a list is aesthetically ugly in my opinion, which is one of the important reasons I'm not using P. So, for lists, using BR is all around better. Yes, for paragraphs I use <P> obviously. But as you must have assuredly read (and I'm sure you must have!), I'm using <BR> for my lists. For my lists alone. Not for my paragraphs.
And lo, an entirely pragmatic reason and a sensible explanation.
You do realize that you don't need the first P.. <p> is not required in this... you only need </p> and it works just fine. Trust me, i do this all the time, every time... And I never once used <p> for anything but still achieve the same results with </p>
I blame the daqueri i had while posting
Yup, that's my excuse, and i'm sticking too it :cool:
I also wonder if the issue was the character limit length, but I assumed that had gotten fixed, and looking at the bio as pasted into Word, it does not appear it does exceed that limit.
Any suggestions?
<font color="orange">Real Name:</font color> Samuel Copperpot<br>
<font color="orange">Aliases:</font color> Sam, Sammy, Samwise, Wise-****<br>
<font color="orange">Species:</font color> Metahuman?<br>
<font color="orange">Age:</font color> Appears about 25. Or the man-bat equivalent<br>
<p><font color="orange">Equipment:</font color></p>
<p><font color="yellow">Putrid Gauntlets</font color> - A pair of mechanical gloves with wicked claws extending past Sam's elbows, that appear to spread his natural taint at an even quicker pace. </p>
<font color="orange">History: </font color>Just another bat-boy, unlucky in life, as well as in love. Sam used to be a smaller than smell time crook, only helping out some local toughs since they were the onle ones who would have him. After one too many incidents got him thrown into prison, Chief Surhoff suggested he might try the other side of the criminal life to see how that feels. He has only occasionally looked back since.<br>
Sam's 'powers'. are not easily defined. He seems to corrupt and corrude most metal in close proximity to him, and can manage to spread this taint to flesh and synthetics with some effort. Further, he seems to be able to subsist on this 'corruption', often leaving his targets structurally unsound (perhaps even genetically). As such, he rarely has any wiling companions in his travels.
The </font color> tag should read </font> instead. You may also want to check and see if some of the words you've used get caught by the filter (a**, for example).
EDIT: You may also want to get an independent party to proofread it. Elaborate HTML formatting won't disguise misspelled words, grammatical errors, or inconsistent punctuation.
Taint is in the filter. Change that word and you might be good.
I will look into both of those suggestions when I get home tonight. Thanks guys.
-WT
I can type lines and lines of description but as soon as I type 132, the description becomes invalid.
What's the mystery behind the number 132?
Why is the "preview" panel 57 characters wide?
Why does the "/target info" console commend to view the bio. written in 58 character wide format limit viewing to 38 characers, thereby screwing up any use of the <P> or <BR> HTML commands?
When you find the answers to these questions, please, post them and let the whole world know, because it's insanely perplexing to me
| ME | A "Guide" Book" | | I, have a "DREAM! | ( Member since Feb 2008 ) ... ?
[SIGPIC]http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b132/AngelOfCaine/STILLS/Misc/CO-Sig_01e.png[/SIGPIC]
Harbringers info (I need all 2000 characters though!)
<p><font color="#F19C48" size="6" face="Courier New, Courier, mono"><b><i>OFFICIAL UNITY
DOSSIER</i></b></font></p>
<p><font color="#F19C48" size="5" face="Courier New, Courier, mono"><b>Name:</font><font size="5" face="Courier New, Courier, mono"> Albert
Zerstoiten (Deceased)</font></p>
<p><font color="#F19C48" size="5" face="Courier New, Courier, mono">Age:</font><font size="5" face="Courier New, Courier, mono">
95</font></p>
<p><font color="#F19C48" size="5" face="Courier New, Courier, mono">IQ:</font><font size="5" face="Courier New, Courier, mono">
200+ </font></p>
<p><font color="#F19C48" size="5" face="Courier New, Courier, mono">Powers:</font><font size="5" face="Courier New, Courier, mono">Albert Zerstoiten: None. Harbringer: Power Armor that is highly adaptable and
nearly indestructible. </font></p>
<p><font color="#F19C48" size="5" face="Courier New, Courier, mono"><b>Facts:</font><font size="5" face="Courier New, Courier, mono">
Born the son of a Bavarian doll maker in 1917. Child prodigy in college by twelve. Two PhD's by twenty. Assassinated by his former masters in the Third Reich.<br>
<p><font color="#F19C48" size="5" face="Courier New, Courier, mono">History:</font>At this point in history UNITY is certain Zerstoiten was replaced by a double. With no one to stand in the way of his technology the Dr. Destroyer identity was created to stage super attacks culminating with Detroit.
Neatly making Silhouette Corp. who was heavily invested in key points around the globe incredibly wealthy. <br></p>
<p>The same Silhouette Corporation which sells super powers... <br></p>
<p>For want of a nail.<br></p>
<p>Resurrected by a spirit of peace , he found himself a Fax machine at SC placing his orders for a replacement body. Un interested in politics or tyranny, he became a secret not even Silhoutte knows about.
In his travels he has ascended and is considered deity.</P>
And it fits in the box, is formatted RAD and etc. IT works.
Risings Info
<p><font color="green"><b>[YOU HAVE ENTERED A FORBIDDEN AREA.]<br>[WARNING]
<br>[AUTO-RESTART IN:]<br>5(</b>(click clickety)<b><br>4</b>(click-click clickety)<b><br>3</b>(Click-click)<br><b>2</b>(click-click)<br><b>********_<br><br></b>[SuperUser]_<br>dir.../$$/catroot/localhost/override/single-user/<br>Open File Project_Harmon_</font>
<br><b><font color="red">******RESTRICTED UNITY MATERIAL****** </font></p></b>
<p><font color="#F19C48" size="5" face="Courier New, Courier, mono"><b>ID:</font><font size="5"> Unknown</font></p>
<font color="orange"><br><b>HT.:</font></b> 6'9"
<br><font color="orange"><b>WT.:</b></font> 771 KG
<br><font color="orange"><b>POWERS: </font></b>Clone of energy signature off <font color=#00ccff>JH IV</font>
during 6/22/92 attack on detroit. <font color=#00ccff>Harmon Power Armor</font>
Suspected to bear
similiarity to that of <font color="00ccff">Defender</font>. Infernally
shielded; Deemed impossible to determine ACL.<br>
Protruding Neural Nano Technology from his head (w/o helmet) give the appearance of horns.<br>
<font color="orange"><b>DATA:</b></font> Since escape from the cloning facility it is known he has subverted <font color=#00ccff>Citizen Harmon.</font> <br>Virtually enslaving <font color=#00ccff>Multifaria</font> itself.<br>As if it wasn't bad enough there. <br>
Sleep suits keep model citizens model at night, while their 'dreams' project themselves as <font color=#00ccff>Roi'neshi </font>into and around our own time stream.<br>
Suspicion indicates he is somehow responsible for the Gadroon, although similiar dead end examinations also point to a watercooler located at <font color=#00ccff>Silhouette Corporation</font>.<br>
The Clones' fiancee <font color=#00ccff>Jill Bates </font>is also suspect of using illegal powers and coincidentally connected to the <font color=#00ccff>Harbringer Organic Watercooler Phenomenon.</font><br>
The Clone has become a skilled master of unarmed martial arts and munitions, perhaps to disguise his true nature.<br>
<br><font color="green">[SuperUser]_
Looks even RADDER with hyperlinks (wish the character count was only characters, not formatting) does not fit in the box and I couldn't apply a font if I wanted to at this length.
I know we have web sites for this stuff, but I want it in game.
Please Dev team. Tell me why or fix it. And give us more characters. And a Sky rim like editor compatible with Google Earth and promos for using Sketch up to make a building and get C points. I wanna play in the Bronx, New York, Manhattan, San Francisco, Seattle, Miami Houston, Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing, and other capitals.
The unordered list <ul> items are definitely NOT parsed anymore. Font can take "FACE" but not size, it appears. Profanity filtered words will gray-out the "Set Description" button (I had "damn" originally, oops).
Finally, for people who NEED a list item, use of the nbsp is really handy. Here is an example: Which should read (very roughly) like:
=============
teh-roy
Happily running around, teh-roy was minding his own darn business one day, when some fool decided to check him out. Little did this fool know that they were going to be reading about themself checking out teh-roy!
Shocked and dismayed, the fool did not know what to make of teh-roy! Should the fool keep reading, slipping down that worrisome path? Should the fool just stop right here and continue no further? It was a difficult decision, much like passing a train wreck and not wanting to gaze upon the carnage; the fool was amiss in ponderations.
The choices were simple:
__o _Stop reading about teh-roy
__o _Admit one was a fool for looking
__o _Leave in a hurried state
Using these basic principals, the fool soon realized the error of their ways and was off. Good riddance, best not to make that mistake again!
=============
Just copy/paste and preview, then delete (make sure you save your bio before). By using TWO (2) nbsp's before the "o" (bullet) and one after the space, gives the indent, and an extra space before the list item. Of course, the forum does not parse INDENT properly, so I had to put in the underscores. You'll see how it works in-game if you do a copy/paste of the CODE posted.
Hope any of this helps people who look to do this!
-r0y