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User:FJH/fjh tabs

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Revision as of 23:10, 5 May 2009 by FJH (talk | contribs)
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About FJH:

FJH first heard about Dwarf Fortress on English imageboard 4Chan in a once-ago thread on its /jp/ board, in 2006. There was a thread that touted the legendary Boatmurdered, but he wouldn't actually read the tale until a year later, when another thread surfaced. He only started playing Dwarf Fortress late 2008, quickly mowing through five fortresses trying to reconcile the minimalist menu system with the wiki at first. Uphill battle even for someone who managed to navigate the text-based adventure game generation that most people have missed. It wasn't until after discovering Captn Duck's Dwarf Fortress Tutorial videos on Youtube that the game began to make enough sense. It still took a throw-away to realize the difference between "dug" stairs and "built" stairs.

FJH likes blueprinting more complicated parts of his fortresses before sending the miners off to stumble upon demon pits and he likes designing multi-story chambers that go unappreciated by his Dwarves. In fact, a lot of hard work occurs on the said scratch paper. He favors a collapse-the-floor technique to mining-out multiple levels at once at the cost of insane planning and an elevated mortality rate. Externally, fortresses tend to sport elaborately built eyesores as their castle defenses; FJH builds walls too thick and high. He tends to over-produce food and drinks by accident but rarely winds-up in prosperous metalworking situations. The bane of his existence is turtle shells and the resource-collection algorithm that calculates distances regardless of walls and floors.

About the only thing FJH does correctly consistently is design stairwells that comply with all safety codes and he is extremely cautious around lava. He has a soft spot for designing hallway moats.

About Other:

His real name is Jason, age 25. He lives on the east coast United States, the state dignified landfill of New Jersey and he doesn't notice the smell. He graduated college in 2007 with a Bachelor in Computer Science and is currently UNEMPLOYED, averaging five job submissions a day, three-four job call-backs a month, less than one interview a month. No, those are not accurate statistics. He has not done any programming work on Dwarf Fortress and only uses graphical mods. He is currently working on a Java program utilizing Java3D on his own time; there may be a tab on it after enough work is done to show for.

FJH enjoys playing older PC games ...

  • The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall
  • Total Annihilation
  • X-Com: UFO Defense

... and such freeware games as

  • Dwarf Fortress(obviously)
  • Spelunky

He is a major fan of The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, SimCity, and Myst series. He will play first person shooters, but is not much of a fan of the genre, but he firmly avoids MMO games for their timesink qualities. He is an old Sonic the Hedgehog fan of the SatAM variety. In TV matters, he shies away from reality TV, reality TV-like gameshows, and most contemporary comedy sitcoms, but is a fan of western- and eastern-styled cartoons (preferring subtitled, in the latter's case), science fiction, and documentaries. He prefers long well-structured arcs over episodic content, or a healthy mix of the two, or that preference can be drowned-out completely by turning the level of symbolism and mindscrew up to maximum. He keeps his footprint on the Internet muted and difficult to trace intentionally. He is one of few people who does not have a Facebook page, not a Livejournal journal, does not use Twitter, does not blog, does not own a Blackberry, iPhone, or any kind of palm pilot-tech, uses his cellphone exclusively to make phone calls, does not even own an iPod, has watched neither Survivor nor 24, and can say all that with some form of pride.

He commonly feels like he was thrown from the caboose of the train his generation was riding. That can also be said with some form of pride.

He is deadpan sarcastic, not all of it intentional, but also is very organized and analytical to a fault. His views encroach sometimes upon objectivism, sometimes upon pragmatism.

If he ever starts referring to something called "the Epic," just nod and disregard his ramblings. If you should start talking about ancient cultures, programming, or the Touhou Project series, he will go insane with enthusiasm in which case you should also disregard his ramblings.

He tends to speak in third person and make obvious observations.

How to Use the PageTab Template

It probably goes without saying, but templates make this wiki much better than it could ever be on its own. They employ advanced and, typically, standardized methods of information presentation and purport aesthetic elegance; but, they are not all intuitive in and of themselves. Some require basic knowledge of how other other templates work to understand how these higher-order templates work; and, some require precise formatting just to accommodate basic display. PageTabs is something like that, whose difficulty is compounded by the template's main definition page itself lacking a set of instructions, and a severe lack of demonstrated examples. As far as I know, the only user and only page that has employed this organized template before myself belongs to Vaevictus, and it is from his user page by which I understand anything about how this template works.


The essential idea behind PageTabs is that a variety of related pages can be displayed from a single page, with each one having a visible bookmark lined-up above the current page as a section header. It is just like "tabbed browsing" only that the pages that you can "switch tabs" between are mostly fixed. At the moment, there is no meta-formatting template that allows for different tab design. The actual operation of tabbed wiki-ing gives the impression of using frames.


To start, check the code behind this page (try editting it) to get an idea of the main tab definition structure.


From the page you wish to include in tabs - we shall call that page WIKIPAGE - you first should create a page called WIKIPAGE/tabs. Create WIKIPAGE/tabs and in this page include something along the following lines.

{{PageTabs
  |[[WIKIPAGE|LABEL1]]
  |[[WIKIPAGE/PAGE2|LABEL2]]
  |[[WIKIPAGE/tabs|LABEL3]]
  |This={{{This|#}}}
}}

This example creates a header with three tabs on it. The first tab links to the main WIKIPAGE on which the tab system shall appear and its tab uses the text LABEL1; subsequent tabs link to respectively subsequent pages and use respectively subsequent labels. Note that each tab is set up to look as if one is typing an external hyperlink! Also note that I have included the last tab as a link to the WIKIPAGE/tab page that contains the definition tag for the rest of this page's tab system. The purpose of this link is for easy access at a later date, to add or remove tabs from the header. This is not necessary, at the end or anywhere, but will be helpful. The specific newline format of the PageTab tag demonstrated here is also not absolutely necessary; it is used for emphasis.


The This line assigns what tab will be indicated on this page, which part of the tab menu will be highlighted when you click on that tab. Assume # is a number where the range is 1 to the maximum number of tabs used. Messing up this line by including a number that refers to the wrong tab or to a tab which does not exist will not mess up navigation, just display, at least right now. If you are connecting to WIKIPAGE/tabs, the number MUST represent the correct tab. Use copious amounts of Show Preview until it looks pleasing before the final Save Page.


Now navigate to WIKIPAGE and, considering other formatting on the page, edit the page and, somewhere on it, include the tag:

{{WIKIPAGE/tabs|This=1}}

Including this line will display the tab header on this page and identify it as the main page for the tab system. When you first see the menu, you will noticed that the text on all tabs excluding the first one (the one you are on) will be displayed like they are broken links. To create and indoctrinate these pages into the system of tabbed browsing, click on the tab to navigate to the nonexistent tab's page and edit it to include the above text, with the appropriate incremented number in the This= line. As opposed to the main definition tag, this number has to be correct, else the wrong tab could be displayed. When you preview the page now, it should include the tab menu you defined on WIKIPAGE/tabs. If you are using my advice and include a tab to WIKIPAGE/tabs, you will still need to edit it in this same manner before it displays the page.


When no tabs show as broken links and all tabs display a unique body of text under the same tabbed header, you are done.