BBCODE.md

FimFiction BBcode reference

This document is primarily of historical interest, since the new BBCode parser of FimFiction is well documented. However, it documents legacy tags which the new parser supports quietly and as such, might end up being useful.

When trying to figure out how to get the typography you want, it helps to know just what exactly is FimFiction's BBcode parser capable of. Unfortunately, it's not really well-documented, and many of the tags in this list were discovered by trial and error. Despite exhaustive search of available lore and copious experiments, no further undocumented tags were discovered. If you find anything else, please send them in!

Quirks

• All consecutive runs of more than one space produce a chain of one space and the same number of   entities.
• If a paragraph starts with a tab character, it will be rendered indented by CSS.
• The only known way to prevent the parser from picking up a tag is to break it up with another tag that will keep the textual content of the square brackets unchanged: [[b][/b]code] will render as [<b></b>code] -- which the reader will see as simply [code]. There are no more generic means to escape a square bracket.

Span level tags

While I say "span level," this is not entirely correct, as bold and italic will carry over to the next paragraph. However, size and color tags, for example, will not, due to quirks of implementation, and it is generally better to treat them all as span level.

• [b]bold[/b] -- bold
  [i]italic[/i] -- italic
  [s]strike[/s] -- strike
  [u]underline[/u] -- underline.

• [smcaps][/smcaps]

  Small caps.

• [size=<size>][/size]

  Text size. While older documentation claims that sizes like "large" and "xlarge" work, this is no longer so -- currently, sizes are given in almost the same manner they are given in CSS. Giving a pure number will work and will be interpreted as pt, with the default text size being 18pt. But I recommend using em, with 1em being the regular text size. You can use more or less any decimal fraction of em, but sizes of exactly 10em and higher will be rejected.

• [color=<color>][/color]

  Text color. Standard HTML color names work. So do hex RGB values in the form of #RRGGBB. RGBA does not.

• [spoiler][/spoiler]

  The traditional spoiler tag, which will substitute black background for the regular one and swap it back on mouse hover. Will be affected by [color], with rather unusual results.

• [icon]<icon name>[/icon]

  Will insert a FontAwesome icon by name, i.e. without the fa- prefix, for example, [icon]check-circle[/icon]. Currently uses FontAwesome v4.0.3, so be sure to check which version an icon was introduced in before using it. The icon remains inline with text and obeys size and color tags.

• [url=<url>]link text[/url]
[url]<url>[/url]

  Your basic URL tag. Unlike most other implementations of BBcode, FimFiction won't accept a quoted URL in [url=<url>]

• [site_url=<url>]link text[/site_url]

  Your less basic URL tag, specifically for in-site links. Will accept URLs with no domain and insert either http://www.fimfiction.net or https://www.fimfiction.net in front, depending on which protocol the reader is using, i.e. [site_url=/blog/616106/guten-tag]post about tags[/site_url] will render as <a href="https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/616106/guten-tag">post about tags</a> -- or as the "http" equivalent if the reader is browsing the http site.

• [email]user@example.com[/email]

  Will render a mailto: email link. This tag does not work in private messages for some stupid reason.

Block level tags

"Block level" is, once again, something of a misnomer. For most of these, if both the opening and closing tag are on the same line, the resulting block will not contain paragraphs, unless there are line breaks inside.

• [hr]

  Inserts a <hr>, which will resist most other styling and won't follow palette choices.

• [quote][/quote]

  Will render to a <blockquote></blockquote>. This is styled as a frame with rounded corners with a different background color. There is no [quote=name][/quote] version.

• [center][/center]

  Will produce a centered block.

• [right][/right]

  Will produce a right-aligned block. There are no tags to left align text because it is always left-aligned by default.

• [left_insert][/left_insert] [right_insert][/right_insert]

  Will produce specially styled blockquote blocks, which will float to the left or to the right of the containing block, taking up half the width. The background color on these is hardcoded, and if the user is reading with a negative palette, the results can be rather crude, so they are best confined to blog posts, but they will work elsewhere. Notice that inserts can be nested. A right insert and a left insert used in parallel will not fit together, and one will push the other out.

• [page_break]

  Will produce a 'Read More' button on a blog post when the post is viewed in a list of blog posts. Won't work in other contexts, and notably, will remain visible in other contexts.

• [youtube=<youtube ID>]

  Will embed a YouTube video. Takes the YouTube ID of a video. Will accept some forms of YouTube URL, but not others, so I recommend using just the ID, because it always works. Will render as a div with an iframe and will obey [center] and other positioning tags.

• [img]<url>[/img]

  Will insert an image. Notice that Imgur no longer permits to embed images on FimFiction, because they're crazy. Additionally, the sanitizer thinks that URLs can only begin with "http" or "https" and data URIs don't work -- which is a shame, because that would be the perfect way to insert a decorative section break.

• [code][/code]

  This is not actually a code tag: BBcode inside will still get rendered, and quirks related to paragraphs will still apply. However, this renders as <pre class="code"></pre>, with a fixed width font, and suppresses line wrapping.

Other observations and trickery

• Unicode character U+00A0 works as a non-breaking space, even when you can't insert a real   entity. So does U+2007 (figure space.) There is, unfortunately, no way to insert an equivalent of a <br/>.