22.4. Gathering the figures

| Chapter 22: Figures, Sounds and Files |

| 22.4. Gathering the figures

Inform provides basic support for displaying pictures and leaves more exotic effects for Extensions to provide. But either way, for reasons explained in the previous section, we can only have pictures if the Settings for the project are set to the Glulx story file format.

Inform calls these pictures "figures", following the usual Inform analogy with books. We will think of our work of IF as being like a mostly textual book which in broken up with illustrations here and there - Figure 1, Figure 2, and so on. These might be used to mark each new chapter of the plot, or each new location: whatever the author would like. So the first thing we need to do is decide when pictures should appear.

The second thing to do is to get hold of the pictures we want to use. These might be photographs, or artwork, or diagrams: anything, really, but we will need them to be in either JPEG or PNG format. Inform does not itself try to be an image editor, or an artwork program - there are many such programs already which do these things much better than Inform could.

The pictures then need to be put in a special place where Inform can reach them. Suppose the Inform project is called Example.inform. Then we need to create a folder alongside it called "Example Materials", and create a further folder inside that called "Figures". The actual images go inside "Figures". So we might then have files like so:

> Example.inform
> Example Materials
> Figures
> Woodlands.png
> Blackberry.jpg
> Red Admiral Butterfly.png

The Materials folder for an Inform work will turn out to have many other uses in the chapter on Publishing, and will be explained further there.

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