Boxed quotation in Glulx?

Over at the italian newsgroup someone’s struggling to make a boxed quotation come up. It appears “Display the boxed quotation” works well with ZMachine but not with Glulx.

I tried messing with Glulx Text Effects a little bit. I think I’m using the latest version, 4/140425. First thing I saw is that the first example has two deprecated, won’t-compile commands. Second thing I saw is that I still couldn’t get a boxed quotation to show up.

But I remember, vividly, that in an aborted Glulx project of mine I was able to display a boxed quotation in Glulx. Could anyone lend a hand? Is this a bug?

Good catch on the deprecated phrases – I’ve reported that – but I can get the boxed quotation to show up. It just doesn’t look like z-code boxed quotations – it’s a little thing up at the top of the screen where the status line goes. Are you sure you’re looking in the right place?

Ok, I was not terribly clear, sorry about that.

SOMETHING does show up, at the top of the screen. It’s an overlay, just like a boxed quotation, but it’s left-aligned rather than centered and doesn’t look like a boxed quotation at all; just like hovering text.

Like I said, I remember having proper boxes quotations in Glulx…

EDIT - Also, the example actually says:

Every turn:
display the boxed quotation “Tempus fugit.”

…but it doesn’t actually display every turn, only after the first turn, then it clears and doesn’t come back. Is that intentional?

I think that is intentional (because there’s a separate Repeat Boxed Quotation extension to change it).

Glulx can’t do a text pane overlaid on another text pane. (This is deliberate.)

The I6 box statement, in Glulx, displays the output in a temporary text pane between the status window and the story window. I7 invokes this. This is the way it’s always worked.

The difference you’re thinking of may be of different interpreters’ interpretation of the “blockquote” style, which could be centered, but probably isn’t.

(Or maybe you’re thinking of the simulated implementation at eblong.com/zarf/glk/glkote/sample-demo.html – type “quote”. It uses a fixed-width quote pane and centers by space-counting. That demo is not a Glulx game, but its behavior could be replicated in I7 with some I6 code.)

And yes, the I7 “display boxed quotation” phrase intentionally tracks strings and shows each one no more than once.

Ok, I found out why I had got it to work previously.

I simply used the extension “Glulx Boxed Quotation version 2 by Eliuk Blau”.

Don’t know whether that one’s still around…

Zarf’s version looks nicer anyway. Could merit a new extension.