About this image
You may or may not already know that Notes can be used to display images. In the Gamebryo-Fallouts i'm pretty sure this functionality was exclusively used for a photo of Dr. Li in Fallout 3.
Using a little creativity however, you can use Image notes to create Wiki-like terminal entries by simply making a basic "texture" with text and whatever other elements you want.
For the text I used the Fixedsys font set to a size of 45px. The entire texture is about 1000x900 pixels.
To be clear, everything below the line just above the Image of Radman, ending at "the world" is a texture.
The downside of this technique is that using an Image note means the entry cannot be dynamically formatted for vewing on both the pipboy, and terminal. Decide from the beginning which device you want the player to encounter these kinds of notes and develop your texture accordingly.
7 comments
A picture by itself is worth a thousand words, so honestly terminal entries like this shouldn't need to be accompanied with pages and pages of text.
The font size of the text or the other elements on the texture can always be made smaller, to fit more information, it's only important that it's legible.
Personally I always found overly long terminal entries to be poor form anyway. Breaking it up in to separate entries (and terminals) instead of a massive info dump is far more digestible. It's a problem that can be mitigated by smarter use of the space you have.
Important details needed to progress or understand the plot should be the most clearly visible piece of information in any text.
Likewise, Riddles and Puzzles should not be obfuscated by irrelevant and potentially misleading information. Note that doesn't require outright telling the player the information you want to communicate. Subtlety doesn't require 400 words.
If you want to covertly communicate key details to the player, there are limitless ways to do that without forcing the player to read through paragraphs upon paragraphs of bunk text for the sole purpose of finding the handful of snippets that are actually important.
And as a bonus, by actually focusing on the key details instead of surrounding it with filler, your own skills as a storyteller and gamemaster will improve.
In all the quest mods I've played, the most consistent complaint I have among them has been poor use of Notes. Tons of random info with only a teasing of actually interesting details. (Or they have a 30 Entry+multiple pages terminal at the very last point of the mod. Basically a novella to fill in the story after it's already concluded.)