12.1. Typography

| Chapter 12: Typography, Layout, and Multimedia Effects |

| 12.1. Typography

Story files produced by Inform tend not to contain elaborate typographical effects. They would only distract. Like a novel, a classic work of IF is best presented in an elegant but unobtrusive font. Inform does, however, provide for italic and bold-face, and also for a typewriter-style fixed pitch of lettering:

> "This is an [italic type]italicised[roman type] word."
> "This is an [bold type]emboldened[roman type] word."
> "This is a [fixed letter spacing]typewritten[variable letter spacing] word."

Authors making very frequent use of these might like to borrow the briefer definitions in Chanel Version 1.

A very wide range of letter-forms is normally available (and even more in quoted text), so that the writer seldom needs to not worry whether, say, a sentence like

> A ticket to Tromsø via Østfold is in the Íslendingabók.

will work. The Über-complète clavier is an exhaustive test of such exotica.

Coloured type is trickier, and its availability depends on the story file format. For a Z-machine game, Garibaldi 2 demonstrates this.

Finally, Tilt 3 combines unusual letterforms (suit symbols) with red and black colours to render hands of cards typographically.

443
| Example Chanel Version 1 Making paired italic and boldface tags like those used by HTML for web pages. |
WI

70
| Example The Über-complète clavier This example provides a fairly stringent test of exotic lettering. |
WI

69
| Example Garibaldi 2 Adding coloured text to the example of door-status readouts. |
WI

439
| Example Tilt 3 Displaying the card suits from our deck of cards with red and black colored unicode symbols. |
WI

Previous | Contents | Next