Help:Customising your signature

This page is to help you customise your signature! It is important when doing so to realise that other users will often need to access your talk page and perhaps your user page or contributions. Therefore ensure that these links are obvious.

Reference

 * Many of these snippets use common HTML elements, the most common of which is  . Visit the HTML section at w3schools.com:HTML reference.
 * Much of the flashy, custom effects are done using CSS. For a complete CSS reference, vist the CSS section at w3schools.com:CSS reference

Basics
Almost all signatures are made using the HTML element  using the attribute "style". The style attribute has a number of CSS properties which combine together to produce a wide variety of possible signature forms. Many signatures use two or more  tags nested within each other: one to produce the box within which the links are contained, and one or more to change the style of the links contained within the box. The basic format used in the  element is:

Font colour
Property: color

You can use this property to specify a colour name as follows:

The same result can also be achieved much simpler with Colour as follows:

Colour names are limited to a list of recognised colour names which can be found here, however hexadecimal codes can also be input to yield any colour:

Font Size
Property: font-size

This property can be used with words like "large" or "x-small":

More control can be used by substituting a percentage for the size:

Pixel sizes may also be substituted:

Underline and Strikethrough
Property: text-decoration

Underline and strikethrough both use the same CSS property, but can still be used at the same time

Underlining and striking can be achieved much simpler using  and   respectively.

Font face
Property: font-family

You can specify more than one font with this property, separated by commas. The first one listed is used by default, but if a user, when viewing your signature, does not have the first font installed, it will display the second font for them. Generic font styles can also be input, such as "Serif", which have "flares" at the end of the letters, "Sans-serif", which does not have them, and "Monotype", fonts wherein all letters are the same width.

Subscript and Superscript
Unlike other formatting code used so far, superscript and subscript does not use the tag, but instead uses separate tags: undefined and undefined respectively.

These must appear outside the tag, as shown below:

Background colour
Property: background-colour

The easiest way to use this property is to specify a colour name, however hexadecimal codes will also work:

Borders
Property: border

There are many different types of borders. The most basic border format is:

Extra space can be put between the start and end of the border and the start and end of the text by putting non-breaking spaces  before and after the text. Just like in font colour and background colour, the colour can be a recognised colour name, found here, or a hexadecimal code. The "1px" value can be changed to alter the thickness of the border, and the "solid" variable can be changed to any number of border styles:

Multiple border styles
The above syntax applies styles to all 4 borders at once. To apply styles to a borders one by one, use the following properties:


 * border-bottom
 * border-left
 * border-right
 * border-top

Rounded corners
Property: Value

The "1em" measurement can be changed to any value between 0em and 1em. 1em is produces a quarter-circle corner which takes up half of the shorter edge on either side of the box. .5 em produces a quarter circle corner which takes up one fourth of the shorter edge. Other values are also possible, and adjust the radius accordingly. Due to the rounded corners, it is often necessary to use &amp;nbsp; before and after the text or specify a left and right padding to ensure its not covered by the border.

The Border-radius template lets you use rounded borders for most major browsers, and should be used instead of specifying specific CSS elements.

It is also possible to set a different radius for each corner by specifying four different em values, one after the other. The order in which they are used is: top-left, top-right, bottom-right, bottom-left. When specifying individual corner radii, it is possible to use measurements larger than 1em, up to 2 em which is a quarter-circle which takes up an entire side.

Images
It is possible to add images to your signature by using the following

However, images contained in signatures may not be higher than 31 pixels. Users can scale images to 31px high without distorting them by using the code:

Additionally, you can add text that pops up when your mouse hovers over the image.

Also, it is possible to make the picture link to a page other than that file's page, although when hovering over it, this will overrule the text in the previous note.

Putting a signature together
As explained in the beginning, multiple styles can be combined in one  tag by separating them with semicolons. The first step to creating a signature is to decide on a border and background. This is a step-by-step guide to creating a sample signature for educational purposes, and is by no means the only way to make one.