Encoded Text

[Context: HL Kit … Basic Concepts and Terminology … Visual Building Blocks]

While not exactly a "building block" encoded text is an important facet of the visual presentation for any game system. Encoded text is the term used for inserting control over colors, fonts, and even bitmaps within text strings. If you want to highlight a word within a string in red, you'll use encoded text. If you want to change the font size for a few works or put a keyword in bold, you'll use encoded text. You can also insert bitmaps into the text stream with encoded text, which makes it possible to do things like display the sequence of dots for traits within the World of Darkness game system.

The encoding syntax uses the characters '{' and '}' to identify the special codes, much like HTML uses the '<' and '>' characters to wrap special codes. The text found between the '{' and '}' characters is interpreted based on the table given below.

IMPORTANT! Not everything makes use of encoded text, so be sure to check the documentation first. If you use encoded text in a place where it's not supported, you will see your embedded special codes within the text displayed.

NOTE! Encoding sequences ignore case, so "{BR}" is identical to "{br}". Exceptions to this are macro and reference names, which are case-sensitive. Similarly, URLs are case-sensitive if the website being addressed uses case-sensitive URLs.

NOTE! If the text within an encoding does not correctly match one of the codes defined above, the text is left unchanged, except as noted above.