![]() | 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.
| ![]() Making paired italic and boldface tags like those used by HTML for web pages. |
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| ![]() ![]() ![]() This example provides a fairly stringent test of exotic lettering. |
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| ![]() Adding coloured text to the example of door-status readouts. |
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| ![]() ![]() Displaying the card suits from our deck of cards with red and black colored unicode symbols. |
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