Inform Designer's Manual: Second Edition
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(23 October 1995)
The second edition of the main Inform manual is now available from
ftp.gmd.de (at present in the directory incoming/if-archive). It is
currently in TeX source but postscript and plain text versions should
follow. Anyone interested in translating it to hypertext or (say) Microsoft
Word is encouraged to get in touch with me (most of the work could be done
by machine translation, but it wouldn't be a trivial job just the same). In
any case, (once past the macro definitions at the top of the file) it is not
impossible to read the TeX source, as TeX in the end is only a "markup
language".
The manual is now a quite substantial book, over twice the size of last
September's first edition: it runs to about 210 pages, of which most of the
last 100 are reference material, a lexicon of terms used, answers to
exercises and a thorough index (about 2000 points in the text are indexed).
There are 98 exercises, all with solutions in full, giving a wide range of
examples; each section gives references to example games. The material has
been properly organised into six chapters:
Fundamentals
The Model World
Describing and Parsing
Testing and Hacking
Language and Compiler Reference
Library Reference
of which the last two chapters are detailed and formal, whereas the first
four are tutorial in style. A modest game called `Ruins' is constructed as
a running example throughout. There is a very detailed contents section
(running for five pages) and it will hopefully be much easier to navigate
the second edition than the first.
The manual documents Inform 5.5 and later, and library release 5/12 and
later: thus it is completely up to date, since library 5/12 also comes out
today.
Inform's example games will need light updating in line with the year and a
half of development since they were written ("Balances" especially), and
this will soon happen: in the mean time, they'll continue not to use modern
features, but they'll still work.
Grateful thanks to all those who proposed fiendish exercises: I wasn't able
to include all those suggested, because they sometimes overlapped, but I
have tried.
I would be very grateful to hear of misprints, etc., as soon as they are
spotted, preferably by email: there are bound to be some.
