| Chapter 20: Publishing |

| 20.10. The Materials folder

If a work is going to be accompanied by other files, it is a good idea to gather these together, and this becomes obligatory when using some of the more advanced "Release along with..." options.

Inform adopts the following convention:

> The files to be released when the project Whatever.inform is published are all kept in a subfolder called "Whatever Materials" in the same folder that contains the project.

For example, if we have a project filenamed Magician.inform which lives in a folder called "Works in Progress", then files might be arranged like so:

> Works in Progress
> Magician Materials
> Collegio.pdf
> Mating Wyverns.mp3
> Magician.inform

Of course the project's filename might not match the title given inside the work itself - it might be an abbreviation, say, or a working title. If so then the name of the Materials folder has to match the name of the .inform file, not the title.

If the advanced "Release along with..." options in the next few sections are used, then Inform will create such a Materials folder if it does not already exist. Moreover, if Inform does use a Materials folder, then that is where it will always place the story file it releases - it will not need to put up a dialogue box asking us where to save the story file, because there is already a natural place to put the story file. For instance, after a successful click on Release, we might then see:

> Works in Progress
> Magician Materials
> Collegio.pdf
> Magician.zblorb
> Mating Wyverns.mp3
> Magician.inform

where "Magician.zblorb" is the actual story file produced by Inform.

When everything is ready, then, the whole folder here called "Magician Materials" can be put online as part of a website, or can be zipped into a single ".zip" archive and emailed out, or uploaded to the IF Archive. (It can be renamed as anything we like: no need for it to be called "Magician Materials.zip".)

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