| Chapter 5: Text |

| 5.12. Displaying quotations

Text is normally printed in between the typed commands of the player, rolling upwards from the bottom of the screen, as if a dialogue is being typed by an old-fashioned teletype. But it can also be displayed in a bolder way, floating above the main text, and this is sometimes used to display quotations.

The original example came in Trinity, by Brian Moriarty, in which the player exploring Kensington Gardens comes upon a location enigmatically called The Wabe. By way of explanation, a quotation pops up. The effect can be duplicated in Inform as follows. (The details of how rules like this work - "after looking...", and so on - will be gone into later.)

> After looking in the Wabe, display the boxed quotation
> "And 'the wabe' is the grass-plot round
> a sun-dial, I suppose? said Alice,
> surprised at her own ingenuity.

> Of course it is. It's called 'wabe,'
> you know, because it goes a long way
> before it, and a long way behind it --

> -- Lewis Carroll".

The quotation will only ever appear once, regardless of the number of times the "display the boxed quotation ..." phrase is reached. This is an effect best not overused: Trinity contains only 13 quotations, despite its size and complexity.

For reasons to do with the way such quotations are plotted onto the screen, their text is treated literally: no substitutions in square brackets are obeyed. (Again, it's a simple feature, and we should go in search of a suitable extension for fancier screen effects if we would like to do more.)

Previous | Contents | Next