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:
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.
That looks pretty good!
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.
Downloaded. I’ll read it during early october 
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
I prefer hard copies of technical material that I can take notes on, underline and mark for quick reference.
Very appreciated.
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).
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.
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:
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:
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.
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)
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.
David Kinder handles the filing, not me.
oops, sorry… I’ll rectify now 
Best regards from italy,
from an embarassed dott. Piergiorgio.
Sure. I hadn’t thought of doing that. Here are the first three chapters of Writing with Inform:
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.
Following up on this thread – it looks like the final locations of these documents at the IF Archive are:
It’s been a while since I’ve worked on this project, but I think it’s still something that should be done, and not just a straight printout of the html files. The version linked above exists in several volumes. With some care put into typesetting it’s definitely possible to get Writing With Inform to fit into a single volume (I’ve done that much, I just got weighted down dealing with some edge case stuff). I’ve been looking at different templating/conversion solutions using Pandoc and the processed version of the manuals on Zed’s github, but I’ve mostly come to the conclusion that the labor required to make a nice printed copy of these is maybe not worth the reward. I still love the idea of having something I can just carry with me in my backpack and flip through, it’ll just take a lot longer than I had hoped before I can dedicate the time and energy required to do it right.
It might be worth waiting for the actual Inform developers to make something available.
Yes, both Writing with Inform and the Inform Recipe Book are in two parts/volumes. Lulu wouldn’t print books any bigger.
I’ve just found a PDF on my computer that’s everything combined, at 2280 pages. It’s quite cool because the internal links all seem to work, including between WI and RB.
Yes, both Writing with Inform and the Inform Recipe Book are in two parts/volumes. Lulu wouldn’t print books any bigger.
Oh, I get that. My point is it doesn’t need to be that many pages. I had a nicely-formatted version of WI that was about 700 pages as an A4 size book.