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

HTML uses angled brackets to achieve effects, and places italicised text between <i> and </i> tags; and similarly boldface between <b> and </b>. We can mimic this very easily by setting each up as a segmented substitution: "Chanel Version 1" To say i -- beginning say_i -- running on: (- style underline; -). To say /i -- ending say_i -- running on: (- style roman; -). To say b -- beginning say_b -- running on: (- style bold; -). To say /b -- ending say_b -- running on: (- style roman; -). Place Vendôme is a room. "[i]Fashion fades, only style remains the same[/i] ([b]Coco Chanel[/b]). And this elegant drawing-room, once a milliner's shop, is a case in point." Instead of going nowhere, say "[i]Don't spend time beating on a wall, hoping to transform it into a door.[/i] ([b]Coco Chanel[/b]) This one is a wall.". Test me with "look / e". We have had to use square instead of angle brackets, but then, "in order to be irreplaceable one must always be different" (Coco Chanel). (Marking these as substitutions which run on prevents unexpected paragraph breaks if they should appear immediately after the end of a sentence.)

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

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