Re: Inform Manual Format


20 Feb 95 15:32:25 GMT

>
> I like Inform quite a lot and have been playing with it for the last few
> days. (And liking it more all the time).
>
> My problem is the TEX format manuals. I am a lowly DOS user and I
> scarcely have any knowledge of TEX--and certainly no way I know of to
> display, print or convert it to a format known to me. I have been using
> the one "designer's manual" that has been dumped to ascii by some
> ruthless machine. It's a whole lot better than nothing, of course, and
> i've surely learned a lot from it. However I'm wondering if anyone has,
> or if anyone *can*, convert them to some other format.. RTF (rich text
> format) comes to mind.
>

Hmm. I never really thought of my Archimedes as "ruthless" before.

TeX is not as unreadable as it looks (once you've skipped the first couple
of pages of macro definitions), but I appreciate the point. In addition
to the plain text version of the DM, there should also be PostScript
versions, which will print on most laser printers.

The Technical Manual and the Z-Machine Specification will not be of
any great interest to anyone except real Infocom hackers, so I wouldn't
worry too much about those. I did also write a general piece called
The Craft of Adventure, but that's also got a plain text edition.

I'm reluctant to go any further in providing manual formats because
of the difficulty of maintaining them.

Graham Nelson
Oxford University