I want to set up some sort of Invisiclues for a game. I imagine a PDF with Questions in black on white and with successive hints in white on white where you mark a line with your mouse and see the text in black. I assume I should write in Word and save as PDF, but my Word program (Windows 7, Office 365) does not show marked text when font colour and background colour are identical. What to do? And are there better solutions or tools? Thanks!
Judging by your post history you might be using Inform?
https://i7el.herokuapp.com/extensions/adaptive-hints-by-eric-eve
If you don’t want the hints to be in-game… I don’t know anything about Word and PDF, but maybe a web page would work? Bundle an HTML file with some CSS that changes the text color of the hints when you click on them (with the :active or :focus CSS pseudoclasses) or hover over them (with :hover)?
Yes,inform (I6 to be precise). In-game was a thought I dropped, might be a fall-back option, Christminster has source code to steal from. I thought PDF was the way to go, but thinking about it, nothing much speaks against a HTML file instead. Will think about it. Thanks!
(Hints on how to set up “invisible yet markable text in PDF” still welcome!)
I make invisiclues-style hints for my games using HTML and Javascript - feel free to copy the code. An example: Detectiveland - Hints
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I’ve enjoyed making a bunch of invisiclues here on the forum, using the spoiler tag.
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What you seek to do can’t be done in Word for PDF format - it’s one of the things that gets lost in translation (since the method to change text colour at a click in Word requires macros). I don’t have a PDF editor to see whether that would work better.
If you don’t have a PDF editor either, I’d go ahead and make an offline web page to provide the Invisiclues as others have suggested.
What you are describing can be done in LibreOffice. Marking white text on white background while in LibreOffice does not show the text when marking it, but it will in the exported PDF.
Edit:
Example: https://cloud.fripost.org/s/tNFwBeLHNajt5kY/download
It works in my local PDF reader, but not in the one built in to Firefox, so probably not a reliable method after all.
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I’ll go with the HTML solution, shamelessly stealing Robin’s code. Still not a walk in the park as I need to amend a few things by try & error (not because it’s complicated but rather because my HTML skills are really limited), but I’ll cope. Goal is one file, and whether that’s a .pdf, .doc or .html is not important in the end.
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