Vorple 4 + I6 and pagination

Authoring Inform 6
1

I’m getting acquainted with Vorple 4.0.1 today for my I6 project. I am setting up the CSS to mimic old-school graphic text adventures; Adventuron-style with a status bar at the top, a fixed-size image just below that, and the story proper below that.

So far so good; everything looks visually correct, and the text scrolls up “underneath” the status bar/image area.

What I do not see happening is pagination for the text. When the initial start text comes on screen, quite a lot is displayed including the intro text, the story title and intepreter info, the initial text for the starting location, and so on. All of the text displays instantly, which renders the first 1/3 hidden under the fixed image section at the top of the layout.

I’m having trouble understanding what I’m expected to implement to enable pagination, or if I’ve just broken it, or if pagination is even supported by Vorple. To paginate, an interpreter needs to know how much room it has to work with, but I don’t see how to signal that to Vorple, especially as CSS rules (and user preferences) can scale the font in various ways.

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It sounds like Vorple is paginating by putting text into a scrollable div and then scrolling it down one div-height (div.scrollHeight) every time you hit a key. This is the same thing stock GlkOte (Quixe) does.

The problem – I infer – that not all of that scrollable div is visible, because you’ve positioned your status window to cover up the upper part of it.

If you arrange your page so that the whole scrollable div is visible below the status window (I mean, like, south of it rather than covered up) then you should not have this problem.

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Yes, I was trying to keep that in mind when I modified the layout. I saw that a container div holds two divs: status-line and window0. I have been using the status-line div as the parent container for the image (treating the image as just one more piece of status-line information). I guess I’m misunderstanding the interaction between those two divs and whichever “real” div controls the height.

div.scrollHeight gives me a more concrete trigger to start looking into, thank you.

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