Help:Editing

From CGAFaq

For overall information about editing pages on wikis maintained with the MediaWiki system (as this wiki is), see the Editing Help page on the MediaWiki website; it has a comprehensive listing of the markup syntax used for wiki pages. Feel free to experiment with wiki markup on the Sandbox page.

Typesetting Mathematics

In addition to the markup described on the MediaWiki page, this wiki also supports typesetting mathematics via the math tag; TeX-formatted equations entered inside the extent of a math tag are automatically converted to small images when the page is viewed.

For example, the following:

<math>L_o(x, \omega_o) = \int_\Omega \, f_r(\omega_i, \omega_o) 
L_i(x, \omega_i) | \cos \theta_i | \mathrm{d}\omega_i</math>

gives the equation:

When entering equations that span more than one line, be careful to not start subsequent lines with one or more spaces; spaces at the start of a line indicate to the wiki that the text on that line should be formatted exactly as typed, ignoring any markup. This can confuse the mathematics rendering engine, leading to unexpected results like the following, where the second line of the reflection equation above was entered with a few leading spaces:

(The quality of math rendering is admittedly not ideal at this point; we'll be looking into higher-quality alternatives in the future. Any such alternative will support TeX math, however, so equations entered now should be fine.)

Categories

When adding a new page to the wiki, please consider adding one or more questions to the FAQ that link to the page. Also, please make links as appropriate to the new page from relevant pages elsewhere in the wiki. Finally, please place the page in one or more appropriate categories.

Categories provide a second way of slicing the contents of the wiki and make it possible to efficiently explore it in a manner different than the top-down view one seens when starting from the main page. The Special:Categories page lists all of the categories currently used in this wiki.

Conceptually, categories are organized as a directed acyclic graph; for example, Category:Geometric_Modeling is a sub-category of Category:Geometry, and Category:Parametric_Curves_And_Surfaces is a sub-category of Category:Geometric_Modeling. Categories should always be defined hierarchically and without cycles.

To indicate that a page is in a particular category, add markup like

[[Category:Parametric_Curves_And_Surfaces]]

at the bottom of the page. Each page can be in multiple categories, as appropriate, and each page should be only in the most specific category that applies to it. (For example, a page related to NURBS surfaces should be in Category:Parametric_Curves_And_Surfaces, but there's no need to add Category:Geometric_Modeling or Category:Geometry to its page, since the parametric surfaces category is a sub-category of those two.

To indicate that a category is a sub-category of another one, go to the page for that category (e.g. Category:Projective_Geometry), and add a tag like [[Category:Geometry]] to that page. From this information, the wiki automatically determines that the category is a sub-category of the other one.

In general, we should follow the approach to categorization described in the Categorization page at Wikipedia. Fortunately, things are a lot simpler here.