Provide a formatting tutorial pop-up or page link when composing a post

On Reddit, you are provided with a “formatting help” tutorial when you make a post:

When clicked, it provides a table of options:

I figure something like this would be useful here on the DevForum as well, perhaps detailing the more obscure formatting options you can do with, say, HTML tags as one example.

  • <big>BIG TEXT</big>
    BIG TEXT

  • <small>small text</small>
    small text

  • <pre><code class="lang-c">insert code here</code></pre>

    int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {return 0;}

  • [details="Subject"]Content[/details]

Subject

Content

  • H<sub>2</sub>O
    H2O

  • x<sup>2</sup>
    x2

  • Line-breaks <hr> :


I’ve found myself googling HTML tags and Discourse-specific things like them to try and make a properly formatted post, and it always takes a good bit of time. A handy little guide exists somewhere here on the DevForum I’m sure, but we should really be introduced to it when writing our posts. Too often a Scripting Support post doesn’t contain properly formatted code and so it makes it especially difficult to read.

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Well, the forum itself doesn’t have a tutorial. But there’s already one here, so I think a better suggestion would be to encourage users to use the search bar

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Not everyone knows what to search for. In the beginning I didn’t think of the word “formatting” so I didn’t know what to type in to look for it.

The editor bar should let you use most functionality with buttons and power users can easily look up more information. I don’t think it’s necessary.

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