I am trying to used boxed quotations, I’m wondering if it is displaying properly. I imagined a box quotation would pop up in a box centered in the window (as happens in Trinity, which the book, “Writing With Inform” references.
When it prints out on my screen, it is the top, not boxed out. In fact, if I didn’t know it was supposed to be there I would completely overlook it. It doesn’t stand out from the text in any fashion, really.
Am I right, maybe this just isn’t a useful effect? Or is it my display?
I don’t think the code matters but:
display the boxed quotation "Part I: Plato's Allegory of Multiple Caves
Now this is the inscription that was written: 'Mene Mene Tekel Parsim', Daniel 5:25";
If you’re compiling to Glulx (which is the default), the quotation appears in a separate pane. Glulx doesn’t have the scribble-directly-on-the-screen capability of Infocom’s old interpreters.
That will also be the case for many Z-Machine interpreters too.
However, if I remember correctly, in Glulx no actual box is drawn around the quote? That is something that should be fixed in the future, I think a bug report has already been filed about it.
A few months ago I was messing around with a way to do this in html, and got an effect roughly like this in Glulx:
I don’t think it looks all that much better than the ‘top pane’ we have now, but if you like the general idea, I could try tweaking it by centering it more or changing the text colors. It would not, unfortunately, work in offline interpreters (on those, it would just display at the top like your current version does).
I’m not laughing at anyone in particular, but when I saw the subject line, I did laugh again. It’s like this boxed quotation thing just never works / goes away / gets resolved / satisfies anyone. A cursory google shows it’s been annoying people for at least twelve years. A non-cursory google might show longer.
In my WIP, I put an opening quote in italics on a screen to itself, just left-justified and not in a box. I couldn’t face the The Box.
It’s to be hoped that we’ll have something like Flexible Windows again at some point and an approach like this (which worked tolerably in 9.3/6M62) would work.
