Pre-formatted and verbatim text - PGML

Pre-formatted text

Pre-formatted text starts with a colon and three spaces. It will be displayed in a monospaced font, and will respect the line breaks and spacing that you have used. But commands and other markup are still performed within the pre-formatted text as normal.

 :   This is preformatted,
 :       and can include any text, e.g., <, >, $, etc.,
 :       but [@ "commands" @] and other *mark up* are performed normally.

Pre-formatted sections can be indented.

 This is flush left.
     Here is some indenting
     :   with pre-formatting
     :   on several lines.
     Now back to normal, but indented.

Verbatim text

If you want to prevent commands from being performed and show the characters literally, you use verbatim mode. Surround the material that should be displayed verbatim with [|...|].

 If you enter [|*bold*|] in PGML it will be *bold*

would produce "if you enter *bold* in PGML it will be bold". Note that verbatim mode is restricted to one line at a time, it can't enclose a line break.

If you need to include |] within your verbatim section, use two vertical bars to start and end verbatim mode.

 You can use [|| [|...|] ||] to produce verbatim mode.

will produce "You can use [|...|] to produce verbatim mode. In fact, you can use as many vertical bars as needed, as long as they are the same number at each end.

Note: some flavors of Markdown use back-ticks (`) to enter verbatim mode, but PGML isn't one of them.

See also Escaping Special Characters for how to prevent the interpretation of special characters.