For starters the line spacing is waaay too tight, to the extent of ascenders clashing with descenders! Since IF is text-focused, the presentation & readability of the text is crucial.
Zoom lets you change the background colour easily, which is very helpful for some of my students who find it difficult to stare at black-on-white text for extended periods.
Zoom is perfect:
dl.dropbox.com/u/1875978/zoom_gargoyle.png
Hm, Gargoyle doesn’t look like that on any computer I’ve every used it on (Mac or Windows). Are you sure that you don’t have a custom setting applied?
Out of the box, Gargoyle’s typography is a cut above Zoom’s, I think. The Gill Sans default in Zoom (and the Inform IDE, which is harder to change) is awful.
If you change the fonts or sizes you should also adjust the line spacing.
It’s configurable in the .ini.
The next version (available in trunk for the adventurous) adds better support for large / maximized windows, by way of letting you configure the max # of rows and columns, and filling the rest with white space.
Having thrown away my preferences file I did indeed revert back to the ‘normal’ view. I guess I’d messed up before I came on here. I had tried to adjust line space but my attempts weren’t reflected in the app. There are several places in the .ini where font settings are adjustable, but the commenting is pretty cryptic. To which I’m 90% sure the folk on here who think editing a .ini file is totally normal and acceptable and everyone should do it, and the sooner people get their dumb heads around editing the configs on their washing machines, microwaves and dishwashers, the healthier mankind will be. In emacs. Obviously. My original question was, since inform seems to have been updated to handle the cocoa change, can that tweak be applied to Zoom, whose interface works for me.
I know you think you’re doing what’s best for me, but I came in looking for a gasket and you’re telling me I should buy a different car.
John.
The reason people are encouraging you to suck it up and use Gargoyle isn’t because they want you to improve your geek quotient, it’s because there has been no update to Zoom. (zarf stated this pretty clearly.) You should probably contact Zoom’s author to ask him for a new release if Zoom is the only path you’re willing to follow.
–Erik
Given that Zoom isn’t currently up-to-date, are there any options for the Mac for anyone who wants to be able to change their display preferences relatively simply? If Gargoyle is the only option it’s the only option, but I agree with johnkershaw that it’d be nice to have an alternative if you need an adaptable display.
Well, Spatterlight might work. It’s the forerunner of Gargoyle and hasn’t been updated in many years (at least 5…?), but it may still function under Lion and has a simple GUI interface for display options. Warning, though: its support for glulx features is not great; there’s a lot of bugginess there. But for z-code or simple Glulx games, it would probably still work. Definitely not to be recommended as anybody’s main choice of terp though.
