Thread:Mario fangamer/@comment-25653892-20141226190052/@comment-25653892-20150104163055

No it's fine, there wasn't a topic to begin with :P

The glowy shit is actually just a text shadow. The text itself is just transparent, so all there is to see is the blurred shadow thing.

First you need to go into Source mode in the lower-left of the comments editor. (It's the button with the brackets on it.) Then, position the text cursor before the text you want to shadowify, and type

Now position the text after the text you want to shadowify, and type

This is very basic HTML, otherwise known as the markup language that most webpages use. Any valid string within angled brackets is parsed into a tag, which affects whatever stuff comes after it until the corresponding ending tag comes up. The end tag has a slash between the first bracket and the tag name. Some tags close themselves, such as  or , and some attributes may come before the closer slash, but most tags are . (Although to close , a   tag would be needed. Cuz potatoes.)

What the   tag does specifically is kinda like highlighting a selection of text and applying format changes. While   isolates a block of content and then formats that content, the    just formats a selection of text, no line breaks or anything auto-inserted.

To make a span of text have formatting, we need to use CSS. CSS is, of course, rules for formatting the contents of specific tags, or alternately of classes. Here's your typical CSS:

p { color: red; background-color: black; }

div.lel { font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; }

The upper code block applies to all   tags, otherwise known as pretty much every normal paragraph. While  through  denote headers,   are just the everyday paragraphs of text and stuff. The indented things are called rules. These rules apply red text color and a black background color to whatever is affected, in this case the paragraph. Meanwhile, the lower code block applies to all divs using the "lel" class. Typing a period before an element means "this is a class". Typing an element name before that period means "this is a class for divs". The rule applies Comic Sans to all divs like this:

This text would be in Comic Sans MS.

A div without that class, or any other tag with the "lel" class, would not format with Comic Sans MS; it needs to be exactly a div with exactly the lel.

However, you can't really put this kind of CSS into comments, because that would require using the  tag. The  tag can only be placed in the head, because it provides formatting changes for the entire page. The comments editor is in the page's body, otherwise known as the content that actually appears in the middle of the browser window. So we need to insert the formatting to a specific selection of text. Hmm… and that's why you had to type  style= into the span tag! You can use the style attribute to apply CSS changes to your text. So let's go back to what you have written:

text to format

HTML tags can use an abbreviated-looking form of CSS, although in reality, all that is missing are the line breaks and indents, the latter of which weren't really that important anyway. Now place the text cursor between the double-quote marks and begin typing:

text-shadow: #000000 0 0 0;

This makes a shadow with a hex color of #000000 (black), a horizontal distance of zero, a vertical distance of zero, and no blur. We can change the color of the shadow and add some more blur. So now you should have something like this:

text-shadow: #40c588 0 0 2px;

which will provide a nice green shadow with a little blur. (Remember: you need units after a nonzero measurement! Zeros can get away with it because they are zero of any unit, although measurements like  px or <font face="Courier"> pt or <font face="Courier">em to get an actual measurement from the parser.)

The text isn't gone though, which provides a sense of slight radioactive glowing. To add transparency to text, we must first have a way to format the text color. After the semicolon, type this:

color:;

Now we can change the color of the text. For transparency, we'll need a slightly less standard color value system: rgba. This is kind of like the typical <font face="Courier"> rgb(64,197,136), but there is an extra non-spaced comma before the closing bracket, and after that comma comes an opacity value, otherwise known as the alpha value. Hence the "a" of "rgba".

The standard transparency is "none of any color, and no opacity". Let's set it that way: no color, full transparency. Set the color values and alpha transparency value all to zed:

color: rgba(0,0,0,0);

And that ought to do the trick! The full code, then, is:

<span style="text-shadow: #40c588 0 0 2px;color: rgba(0,0,0,0);">text to format

This will give the output:

<span style="text-shadow: #40c588 0 0 2px;color: rgba(0,0,0,0);">text to format

Also you just skipped down here, didn't you. If you want to be able to do this stuff with anything other than text shadows, read the rest of the post =.=;

Well now you know how to do shit. Good job! (This episode has been brought to you by <font face="Courier"> , <font face="Courier">   , and <font face="Courier">  . Sue them instead.)