The Infamous Line Break Problem

Authoring Inform 7
1

I’m sure there’s an easy fix for this, but I don’t remember what it is. First my code (mildly spoilery, but you will have forgotten all about it by the time the game is released, if it ever is):

Instead of inserting the hairpin into the keyhole for the first time:
	now the sturdy wooden door is not locked;
	say "You poke around in the keyhole with the hairpin. This always works in the fairytale books, doesn't it? After a minute or two of aimless fiddling, you hear and feel a satisfying click.";
	if the barred window is not-looked-out-of:
		say "A large, cheerful-looking magpie lands on the windowsill, peers through the bars at you, flaps its wings, utters a loud squawk, and then flies away."

The problem is, as it’s coded here, there is a return to a new line after “satisfying click.”, but no empty line feed, so the visual appearance is very wrong. However, if I insert [paragraph break] before “A large, cheerful…”, I get TWO empty lines before the second text rather than just one. So how do I get a single empty line between the two blocks of text?

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2

Insert [line break].

Inform has many intractable line break problems, but this one is easy.

EDIT: Hold up, I wrote that without testing. The situation is more annoying than I thought. Gimme a sec.

EDIT: Yeah, okay. Putting [line break] at the start of the magpie line is what you want.

I was trying to put various substitutions at the end of the “click” line, but this is not helpful for annoying reasons.

It sometimes also matters whether the “not-looked-out-of” predicate invokes a rulebook or not. In this case, not an issue.

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3

Thanks. That nails it.

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