Abstract: Include a page summary
I wish to include a short summary at the start of the page. What is the best way to do this?
William Caxton: the first English printer
There are 2 approaches, depending on whether or not you want the summary to be visible in the HTML view of the page:
- use the (:description:) directive, which maps to the abstract element and creates a semantically distinct abstract section
- use the indent -> line markup, which maps to the blockquote element and treats the abstract as part of the text body
This page uses the first, and generally preferred, approach.
If you use (:description:)…
- the abstract is visible to search engines, but not to human browsers (and Google ignores it)
- in the PDF, it prints after the title and author, before the table of contents (if specified), as an indented block with the heading Abstract
- the directive is text only — no wiki markup is allowed, although HTML entities are supported (notably the ¶ character)
If you use indent markup…
- the abstract is visible to human browsers, but is just body text to web crawlers
- in the PDF, it prints after the table of contents, indented and normal size, with no title
- any inline wiki markup can be used — it’s just regular text
Note that when a page is typeset as part of a trail, the description text is ignored.
Category: markup
