Differentiating room names

Authoring Inform 7
1

I have two rooms: Emporium and Emporium Entrance, and thing, Emporium marquee. However, when I want to SHOWME EMPORIUM, it asks which of these three things to show. If I use a printed name, then it asks which of the printed names.
If I say Emporium after the SHOWME question, it merely repeats the question.
How can I designate Emporium different than the other two?
Here’s the declarations:

Village is a region. Town Centre, Emporium Entrance, Emporium, Inn Entrance, the Inn, the Stables, Arcaneum Entrance, Arcaneum, Monastery Entrance, Monastery, Tavern Entrance, Tavern, and Stockade, and Stadium are in the Village.
. . . 
The Emporium Entrance is east of Town Centre and west of Emporium.

NOTE: The Emporium is in an extension; the Emporium Entrance is not. Does that make a difference?

2

This is a constant headache when naming things. You can do something like:

Emporium-entrance is a room. It is privately-named. The printed name is "Emporium entrance". Understand "emporium entrance" as Emporium-entrance.

That way simply “emporium” won’t match emporium entrance.

1 Like
3

There’s also Numbered Disambiguation Choices by Aaron Reed which is supposed to address this difficulty.

4

Or another possibility is don’t use “Emporium entrance” at all. Use something like “main entrance”.

2 Likes
5

This is another thing that Inform doesn’t handle very well out of the box. The usual solution is just to rename your rooms.

But unless you have some new actions applying to rooms (maybe a GO TO command or something like that), this particular case will only matter for debugging, so you can just Understand "main" as the Emporium. for your own private use.

6

Thanks to all.
Phil: I noticed that you used privately-named. How is that different from publicly-named, or properly-named? Will the SHOWME command not recognize a privately-named room?

7

Privately-named means you can’t refer to it in a command (such as SHOWME) using the name in the source. If you don’t specify any Understand "…" as the whatever. instructions, then you can’t refer to it at all in a command.

Proper-named is completely unrelated to that, as it just means Inform won’t print an article in front of the name.

2 Likes
8

OK, thanks. I think I’ll rename my rooms, or at least hyphenate two-word room names.