Chapter 5: Text
5.7. Line breaks and paragraph breaks

Inform has an automatic mechanism which tries to ensure that paragraph breaks occur naturally when different rules produce text. Thus, if a rule says "Arnold suddenly rushed out of the room!", this will normally be set apart from the text preceding it by a paragraph break.

This mechanism is quite hard to fool, but not impossible, so text substitutions are provided to override it. Saying "[line break]" forces a line break, "[no line break]" prevents one. For instance:

"The chorus sing [one of]Jerusalem[or]Rule, Britannia![no line break][at random]."

Here the "[no line break]" stops Inform from thinking that the exclamation mark means a sentence ending - it's part of the name of the song "Rule, Britannia!".

"[paragraph break]" forces a paragraph break. More subtly, "[run paragraph on]" effectively makes the next paragraph run straight on from the current one. And saying "[conditional paragraph break]" marks a place where Inform can put a paragraph break if it needs one. (This is sometimes useful when producing a large amount of text which changes with the circumstances so that it is hard to predict in advance whether a paragraph break is needed or not.)

There is just one other form of paragraph break, used only in special circumstances: printing clarificatory text after a command, when we are telling the player that we are making a guess at what was meant. For instance:

(first opening the Wicket Gate)

Conventional spacing here is that text should immediately follow on the next line, unless we are going to a different room and looking around, in which case a line break should be added. We can get this spacing convention using the text substitution "[command clarification break]"; for instance:

say "(first opening [the noun])[command clarification break]";


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** Example  Beekeeper's Apprentice
Making the SEARCH command examine all the scenery in the current location.

RB


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