Inform Pre/Post Build Commands & [Quixe] Title page images

I’m having a play around with glulx windows and graphics for a new project (hitherto I’ve only really used the z-machine format) and I’m running into some behaviour that’s mystifying me.

Originally, figure display was working in the Windows IDE but not in Quixe, but I found a thread talking about the script that needs to be run manually to fix that – which is mildly annoying (part of which was needing to install Python) but manageable. (It’d be nice if Inform could be told to run a script to do some extra things before/after the release process, either via script or via IDE setting.)

The unsolved half of the above is that while the Windows IDE interpreter displays the figure centred, Quixe shows it left-aligned. The I7 phrase used for display was display figure-name centered, via “Glulx Image Centering by Emily Short”.

Looking at the HTML output, there appears to be two things going wrong – the first is that it’s outputting <span> tags for the user-style set by the extension on both sides of the image but not actually surrounding the image. The second problem is that there’s no CSS styling that’s causing either of those things to actually be centered (the image itself only has the ImageInlineUp class).

Would this work better in a graphics window, or is there something else that can be done to solve this? (I would prefer to get this working without a graphics window, unless it’s possible to show and hide a graphics window without disturbing the text in the main window, and/or to display text in a graphics window.)

I had some other problems but during the course of typing this message I managed to find workarounds.

(As an aside, along the way I’ve found a fairly serious issue in the Public Library version of “Title Page by Jon Ingold”; I’ll send a fix to github soon.)

@mirality Regarding this statement, may I ask you to clarify a little? Are you looking to create some pre/post build steps as part of the release process?

Yes, that’s what I had in mind. When hitting the Release button in the IDE, it could be told to run some extra scripts either before or after the main compile (or both).

For some use cases, “before” could be used to grab some files stored elsewhere and pull them into the materials folder, and “after” could be used to make further adjustments to the files (eg. doing some project-specific CSS tweaks that you didn’t want to put in the template for some reason, or as in the above case, running the script that makes Quixe able to locate the figures).

Ideally each project would be able to specify different scripts via the project-specific Settings tab. But failing that, it could just look for a script file with a predefined name in the materials folder. (That’s not as good though as people would probably want to use different scripting languages and hence file extensions. Though as long as it accepted the most common script types for the platform, someone could easily enough write a script in that which just called the one that did the real work.)

In the IDE I do not believe there is a way to accomplish it; however, I think you could implement a script to do what you want by calling the compiler from the commandline and wrapping those calls with your pre and post build commands. You might want to check out this thread: