Formatting

This is a technical article and may not be helpful to non-technical users.

This article has to do with inline formatting of IRC channel text by users. IRC formatting is complicated because there is no official IRC standard, only de facto standards implemented by IRC client developers. The most common scheme is the mIRC encoding, Mibbit uses this standard.

In short, a special character signals special formatting. For colors it uses a special character, followed by a number indicating color. The IRC client then hides this special character and the color code (if it is a color).

Different Operating Systems and Browsers may or may not be capable of displaying the special characters used by the mIRC formatting scheme (as they are generally meant to be hidden from user view) so the information displayed here may be incorrectly formatted for your system.

To use formatting in Mibbit Aliases (or even to copy directly into Mibbit's Chat Input field) you must be able to properly generate the character (see http://tools.mibbit.com/public/mirc-codes , doesn't work in chrome).

The hex character Codes:

• Bold Text - Character 0x0002 (it can be copied from the output of /cs info #ch , a "square" following the "channel #ch" in some browsers)
• Underlined Text - Character 0x001F
• Italic Text - Character 0x0016 - not working in mibbit(?)
• Color Text - Character 0x0003 (followed by simple number codes to indicate the selected color)
• Normal Text - Character 0x000F

An excellent reminder with formatting and color is simply because you can, does not mean you should.

Other (non-Mibbit) Resources:

• http://www.visualirc.net/tech-attrs.php
• http://www.ircle.com/colorfaq.shtml

Examples:

• http://www.geocities.com/SouthBeach/Marina/4942/mirc_art.htm