And for @Piergiorgio_d_errico, here’s what it might look like if I included author and year for each game. Do you like the way it looks? I could include it as a variant of the final release.
Run_This_Example.pdf (1.6 MB)
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first and foremost, this perhaps is the skipped v.5 
and frankly, because this is a forum where mutual trust is strong, I close an eye on your unfortunate choice of file name, one who elsewhere raise red flags of “trojan” 
on the author and year, I apologise because I was too generic, not wanting to offend your excellent effort, so I don’t have pointed to the most common citing style, that is,
title (author, year) [superscripted note] e.g
Curses (Graham Nelson, 1990) [xxx]
My apologies for having pointed the obvious to a fellow scholar, also I’m embarassed…
on another point, USENET was the environment and “meetinghouse” of IF community until we moved here on intfiction around 2012, and personally, I think that is more than a background to the meat of the research, centered in the three Big Comp, XYZZY, IFComp and Spring Thing (and this raise another critique, IMO the Spring thing chapter should be the “the Spring Thing”, not “other competitions” (btw, contain only the Spring Thing…) ), so back on the treatment of USENET, I think that ought to be the first chapter, introducing the milieu, the IF community of the 90s and early aughties, of the Big Three competitions.
Best regards from Italy
dott. Piergiorgio.
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I actually haven’t seen this citation style before (I was in the field of math that uses just the [xxx]). Do you have an example online I can look at? If I can get a name for the citation style, it’s easy to configure Latex to print whatever I want.
the very first random thing from arXiv:
whose is nearby what I mean: the cite itself is the link to the note, in the improvised notation I have given [xxx] is the superscripted link to the note.
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
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ah, I see; that’s basically what I did, just not with superscripts. I can fix that, but I’d have to change all the ‘superscript citations’ in my thing to ‘regular citations’, which I can do, but since it takes a while I’ll leave it until I publish an ‘official’ version in a week or two.
Thanks for your help!
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This sounds to me like the author-date version of Chicago style: Author-Date Style
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much more nearby the style I suggested than the arxive example I give above, the only difference is that in my suggestion title precedes the author-date part.
perhaps I can call it a title-author-date style ?
Hope both of us helped Mathbrush in finding an useful LaTeX script… whose, AFAICT, is the rationale on our digression on defining the style I suggested.
Side note, actually I have written my dissertation with LyX (a Tex-centered WP designed for academic work) but the source is buried inside two or three of the dozens of USB hard drives here and here in my shelves (I 'fess up that IBM for once was right with these heavy and bulky 14" removable disk pack: once shrinked to 3,5" and a much simpler interfacing the concept became the ideal backup/archiving/offline storage method…)
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
Including authors in the superscript is a big improvement but I guess it won’t affect the Kindle version.
Btw I’m about 1/3 of the way through.
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I was able to get Piergiorgio’s suggested format working, but unfortunately I realized my dilemma.
Right now, I have my citations on the right side of punctuation, but with non-superscripts they’d have to be on the left side of punctuation.
Regex should fix that but I originally moved everything to the right with regex and it caused a multitude of unexpected problems (as @Lancelot can attest).
So, the best I can do is to make two superscript versions, one with just numbers (like the standard in technical fields, which is more compact) and one with names and years in superscripts.
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Also, apologies if I am now slower to respond, I was on summer vacation and dedicating most of my time to this book, but I’ve returned to work and must earn my bread by the sweat of my brow before I have time to work on the book.
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I did that, which feels a little slimy to admit in public, but your permission makes it easier to confess.
Two small things (which I’ll name by section rather than page number):
- 3.28.3: You mention According to Cain as placing fifth in the IF Comp. It placed sixth. (I believe you gave the correct ranking everywhere else.)
- 1.32.1: The in-game title for the PC is “indagator,” which comes from Latin.
I’ll keep looking through the other parts and let you know if I find anything.
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I would love to help review this book… Let me know how I can be of help!
Jim in Wisconsin
I’ve just messaged @mathbrush with loads of high level feedback. I haven’t quite finished reading the book yet - the many essays at the end are still happily keeping me entertained and educated. And I don’t want to rush them!
I think it’s a fab book though, and would recommend reading it to anyone interested in IF, its history, its best games, and how to write IF games. A huge contribution to the field.
Well done @mathbrush!
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Thank you, I’m going through it right now. I think it will really help the overall structure.
@jimmyinwisconsin thanks for volunteering! I think it would be most helpful to look at the new version I’ll post after going through @vivdunstan’s suggested changes, which should be later tonight. Thanks for offering, and I’ll get it to you soon!
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LearningV7.pdf (1.5 MB)
Here’s a new version! I just barely added several new things, so there might be some glaring problems. The order has been heavily restructured.
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I was reading the section for howling dogs, and it seems like there’s some inconsistent formatting. Sometimes it’s lowercase “howling dogs” and sometimes it’s uppercase “Howling Dogs.” Same with “porpentine” and “Porpentine.” There are also a few typos and grammar mistakes. I do proofreading/editing as a side gig, which is why this stuff sticks out to me. I wouldn’t mind giving the manuscript a proofreading pass if you’ve got a Word file. I don’t know how long it would take me though. If you’ve got a deadline, I might not be able to finish fast enough.
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Came here to mention the same about uppercase/lowercase. In the section on Howling Dogs, there’s also a typo: “persecution of women, ad misunderstandings.”
Another note: The discussion of Eric Eve’s legacy in 3.5.14 should probably also mention that he wrote adv3Lite, an alternate parser and library for TADS 3. My two titles (and my coming WIP) and probably at least a couple of the recent TADS releases depend on it. He’s still releasing new versions (most recent was last month).
EDIT: Actually, Mike Roberts may have written most of the new parser (called “Mercury”), which Eve went on to finish. I’m not the person to ask about the specifics.
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It’s written in Latex and compiles to pdf, but I can use Pandoc to convert it to a docx (which strips out all the references, unfortunately. I think there’s a way to get pandoc to keep the citations and bibliography but haven’t gotten it to work yet).
Here’s a github page with a docx and epub version:
@jnelson thanks, I’ve added mention of adv3lite and his Inform 7 conversation extensions!
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I just got the docx version from GitHub!
The way I usually edit manuscripts is by enabling Track Changes in Word. Then authors can compare the original vs edited version. Sometimes I’ll leave comments in the margins too. Would that be helpful if I did the same thing with this docx file? Or would it just create a headache if you’d need to somehow transfer all the little edits–periods and commas and whatnot–over to another file?
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I don’t mind whatever you send me, I can take a look at it. If there are large scale stylistic choices though that aren’t straight up errors I may not implement them, though; for instance, changing the use of contractions or the level of formality. I’m basically out of time on this project (my real job has started up) so I’m mostly just looking for changes that are both noticeable and embarrassing (like the uppercase/lowercase on Howling Dogs). I’ll likely post this on the ifarchive (and I think the IFTF plans on posting it) in a week or two, and then do another new version if significantly more bug reports come in after a few months).
Thanks for offering help!
I did just find out how to embed the references into docx and epub, but I will implement that in the next version after this.
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