Working on a printable PDF version of the Inform 7 books

Authoring Inform 7
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I’m working on a printable PDF version of Writing With Inform and the other I7 books in @Zed’s i7docs repo using the Prince library and some JavaScript/CSS modifications to do various cleanup things.

It’s still an early version and the format and design are highly opinionated based on my own needs but if there’s interest, I could set up a Github repo so people could play with it/contribute to it.

Here’s what I’ve got so far:

Writing With Inform PDF Manual Test.pdf (2.3 MB)

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I created PDFs of both books and printed them via Lulu (along the lines of Printed copy of Inform 7 Handbook available - #16 by Jonathan). It worked out as two printed volumes each (ie four printed volumes in total).

I contacted Emily Short for permission to share them here, but she said that offering printed books was something she and Graham would want to work on themselves instead. This was back in April 2021 so maybe things have changed.

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That looks pretty good!

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I’ve been able to get WI down to between 600-700 pages. The Recipe Book is, however, a beast. I’m still trying to decide how I want to typeset and organize my personal version of it, and it will almost certainly have to be printed as two volumes or maybe even three (organized by example difficulty, perhaps?).

Official versions of both books (and heck, a nice printed copy of the Standard Rules for good measure) would be preferable.

I think someone with nice document creation software would be able to do something far better than I (hence my intent to make a community project out of it). I don’t know much about typesetting or book design (although I don’t work and have nothing but time to learn). Honestly, this started as an excuse to finally learn more CSS and JavaScript and to have a version of the manual where I could highlight things, scribble notes in the margins, etc.

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Downloaded. I’ll read it during early october :wink:

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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I prefer hard copies of technical material that I can take notes on, underline and mark for quick reference.

Very appreciated.

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I completely agree. I’ve sent a message to Emily again and hope she agrees. I’d got the PDFs all formatted and had the Lulu link ready. Even at cost price the printed books are quite expensive, so definitely only for the fanatical.

I agree with this too! From memory, I used a combination of Times New Roman (for the main text) and Arial (for the code).

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Lulu books are worth the cost. I have Jim Aikin’s Inform manual and refer to it often with working with I7, even version 10.

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I heard back from Emily Short. She and Graham Nelson don’t mind us printing things for ourselves, but any official version would have to involve them. So:

  • On the Lulu pages I’ve included the text “This is an unofficial publication of the original text.”
  • Without the “Select Access” URLs (below) the books won’t be available on Lulu’s website.

As with Jim Aikin’s “Inform 7 Handbook”, they’re available at cost price (i.e. £0 profit to me!) You could confirm that using Book Cost Calculator | Lulu.

I’ve just discovered that the PDFs are too big to upload here, but I believe it’s possible to make them downloadable from Lulu, so I will try that.

Here are the books:

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Boring part...

I couldn’t work out how to make the PDFs downloadable at no cost from Lulu. I thought about asking the moderators here to increase the max attachment size kb, but didn’t want to cause extra work. I temporarily increased the max_upload_filesize of IFWiki but then realised that the wiki has only ever had image uploads before. I thought about Dropbox but I’d likely end up moving the files and accidentally breaking the link.

In the end… I remembered the IF Archive and submitted a zip of the PDFs there. I’ve suggested that it be added to the books folder (Index: if-archive/books) but the message below mentions the temporary unprocessed folder (Index of /if-archive/unprocessed).

Thank You For Your Upload

The machine comes to life (figuratively) with a dazzling display of colored lights and bizarre noises. After a few moments, the excitement abates.

Thank you for your upload. Please check the following filenames and file sizes to make sure the file was uploaded correctly.

  • Writing with Inform and Inform Recipe Book PDF versions.zip (21133707 bytes)

Note that your files may not appear in the unprocessed folder for a few days, and they may not be moved to their final destination for a few days after that.

Thanks again for your upload. You may return to the Archive if you wish.

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Do you think you could upload a couple sample pages here (or message me privately if you’d like)? I’d love to see what the inside of it looks like before it’s available in the IF Archive (assuming it’ll actually be accepted)

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no haste, DavidK will soon put it in the right place (whose, BTW, isn’t /book but /infocom/compilers/inform7/manuals for historical reasons harking back to Graham’s release of Inform 1…)

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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David Kinder handles the filing, not me.

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oops, sorry… I’ll rectify now :blush:

Best regards from italy,
from an embarassed dott. Piergiorgio.

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Sure. I hadn’t thought of doing that. Here are the first three chapters of Writing with Inform:

Writing with Inform Pt 1 - chapters 1-3 only.pdf (1.7 MB)

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The PDFs are in the IF Archive unprocessed directory now: https://ifarchive.org/if-archive/unprocessed/Writing%20with%20Inform%20and%20Inform%20Recipe%20Book%20PDF%20versions.zip.

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