| Chapter 19: Illustrations |

| 19.5. Displaying the figures

Inform's basic picture support simply allows figures to be shown at particular times. Once seen, they scroll away, just as text does once it has been printed. These pictures are really part of the stream of narrative. (If we would like icons or other images to be permanently present on screen, and divide the screen up in pictorial ways to achieve interesting layouts, we need to use special extensions to access Glulx's more exotic features.)

Displaying a picture is therefore like printing some text. Rather than

> say "The woodlands stretch from here to the horizon.";

we would write

> display the Figure of Woodlands;

As an option, we could also write

> display the Figure of Woodlands, one time only;

which causes the image to be shown only the first time this phrase is reached.

Once again, note that the "display" phrase does nothing unless the Settings for the project are set to the Glulx story file format. When a Glulx work is released as a blorb (the default setting for the way releases occur: see the chapter on Publishing), all the images used are automatically included.

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