Do boxed quotations work as they're intended with Inform 7?

I’ve been experimenting with introduction styles, trying to reproduce something like the effects found in Anchorhead, but the examples given in the Inform 7 documentation don’t quite seem to work properly. And it’s not merely a matter of version 6 being present when the text expects version 5, I corrected for that.

The ‘Tempus Fugit’ box that is supposed to appear every turn in one of the examples doesn’t. It appears as a unboxed, uncentered line of text after the very first turn, and never again. The example of how to make a splash page doesn’t quite work properly, either. Neither in Inform’s run-through of the code, or in released versions accessed by Gargoyle.

Am I misunderstanding something?

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Boxed quotations aren’t possible in Glulx. Glulx was designed to never have overlapping windows and so it will never support boxed quotations.

My first if game was Curses and it used boxed quotations heavily, so I was really disapppointed to discover this property of Glulx.

On web you can turn them into boxed quotations by messing around with css. I found a way to do it with my modified web interpreter bisquixe but since it wouldn’t work on things like gargoyle I didn’t bother implementing it.

If you compile to z code it should work just fine.

If it doesn’t work in z code then you’re right it’s a big bug!

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Moved to Inform 7 subforum. Hope the mods agree on the move…

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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This is probably not helpful, but you can approximate a boxed quote by printing centered, fixed-width text in a box made of reverse video spaces, in the main window.

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Damn.

Are there many disadvantages to releasing the game in Z8 format instead? I wouldn’t be able to make it multimedia, I suppose…

The main issue with Z8 is size, I think; once your game gets too big, it won’t compile in Z format anymore.

It does sound from this form thread like z-machine isn’t great for graphics:

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'm surprised Inform 7 doesn’t mention in the documentation that the screen effect doesn’t work with Glulx.

I’m even more surprised that the Glulx format doesn’t permit it. }:c(

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You can do boxed quotations with Vorple:

However, they’ll only display properly in the modified Vorple web interpreter (I think there is some sort of fallback if you run it in a normal Glulx interpreter, but I’m not sure what exactly).

There’s a bug about Glulx boxed quotations: I7-2434 (@Zed should reopen it IMO).

Some background: there have been two ways to implement the Z-Machine’s boxed quotation - by truly overlaying it over the main buffer window, or by expanding the status window temporarily for the quote. The first way is a cool effect, but not possible to implement in the half of the interpreters which use Glk. The second way can be implemented in Glk interpreters, which means it can also be used by Glulx!

I don’t know why Inform 7 has supported the boxed quotation phrase but without attempting to do anything similar to the Z-Machine’s boxed quotation formatting. But it can definitely be significantly improved.

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Do it with ASCII:

When play begins:
	printquote.

To printquote:
	say paragraph break;
	say fixed letter spacing;
	say " _________[line break]";
	say "|  Quote  |[line break]";
	say " ---------[line break]";
	say variable letter spacing.

Edit: You can add as many spaces as you like after the first quotation marks to move the box toward the center of the window.

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You can do boxed quotes in Glulx just fine, but you need an extension for it. Previously this was Glulx Boxed Quotation by Eliuk Blau, but I’m hoping it’ll be built into Inform in the next release!

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Does it recreate the original version (a black box that overlays the text below, leaving some beyond the edges, and typing removes it) or does it do something close to the original?

Or you could change the status line using Inform 6 code to have extra lines, go to certain points and draw reversed spaces in a box, then go back and write text.

It’s a fundamental Glk limitation that it can’t be superimposed on another window. (Well, if the existing window is a grid window, you could fake it. With a huge amount of tedious effort you could even restore the previous text when the quote box goes away if you’ve kept track of its contents character by character.)

But it’s straightforward to replace the existing text buffer window with a grid buffer and horizontally center some text. (And that grid buffer could be the statusbar window with extra lines, as Max noted.)

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When I finally started a game with a quote, I just put it on the left of the screen. I like how it presents. If you want to see how this looks and consider whether this may be the alternate Glulx route for your quote, visit my Andromeda Acolytes demo and press 1 to start a new game.

-Wade

Iirc it splits off a new window between the status bar and the game text, centers the text in that new window, then removes it after a turn or two. Scroll Thief uses this a few times but you have to get annoyingly far into the game to test it. Let’s see…

Here we go.

In Parchment, on iplayif:

In Quixe, on the game’s original website:

The box disappears after the next input.

If you want to test this: press S to skip the intro, then OPEN BAG. REZROV DOOR. N. E. PRESS FROTZ. FROTZ ME. W. NW. SEARCH MIRRORS. THROW JOURNAL AT WALL-SIZED. That’s the fastest path I’ve found to make a box quote show up.

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I have a pretty good text box extension for 9.3/6M62 that I intend to update for 11.0.

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I’m giving serious thought to just returning to Inform 6, which I was learning at the time I first stopped writing IF.

If I can’t figure out why the program won’t bundle a single image into the Release version, even though it displays it just fine in testing, I think I will.

The limitations of Glulx are exactly the same whether you’re compiling to Glulx from Inform 6 or Inform 7, for what it’s worth.

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I wouldn’t be using the Glulx format in that case, and the documentation for Inform 6 seems to be significantly more accurate than Inform 7’s.