5Z71 (18 April 2009) INFORM FOR OS X A new option on the Advanced panel of the Preferences allows the user to choose between Git and Glulxe as the interpreter used in the Game panel to play back Glulx-format projects. A new option on the Format menu, "Enable elastic tabs", causes Tables in the Source to be shown with elastic-width tabbed columns, which are the right width for their content. (Typing a single tab is enough to mark the end of the contents of a table entry; it's as if the tab is made of something elastic, because it stretches as needed.) Various minor bugs have been removed. INFORM FOR WINDOWS The spell check dialog now lets the user choose the dictionary language, and whether or not all text is checked, or just the text in quotes. Spell check dictionaries for different languages can be installed by copying the ".aff" and ".dic" files into the "Dictionaries" sub-directory of the Inform 7 installation. Dictionaries can be downloaded from the OpenOffice project at http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Dictionaries In the Source tab's Replace dialog, selecting "Replace All" will also replace the currently selected word, if it matches. The interpreter in the Game tab can now play MOD music files. Sounds playing in a game in the Game tab are stopped when the game stops. Interpreter command files (containing a list of commands entered by the user into a game, as recorded by a game interpreter such as Frotz) can be imported into the skein with the File menu item "Import into Skein". There is now a choice of Glulx interpreters for the Game tab: either Glulxe or Git. If there are any problems with games under Git that do not show up under Glulxe, we would be interested to hear of it. The directory that Inform uses to store extensions, documentation, etc, which defaults to the user's "My Documents" folder, can be changed by creating a text file "home.txt" in the same directory as the Inform executable, containing the path to the required home directory. More options added to the preferences dialog. Alt-cursor left and right are now mapped onto the tab's back and forward actions, rather than the web browser's history. INFORM FOR GNOME ON LINUX Colour now works in the Game tab. The Game tab now has a choice of two Glulx interpreters: in addition to the traditional Glulxe, which has been brought up to date with version 0.4.4, one can now test one's Glulx projects in Git 1.2.2. "Elastic tabstops" have been added as an optional way to display the source   text - this makes table columns the right width regardless of where tab   positions lie. This feature can be enabled in the Preferences window. INDEX The most visible change in this build is that the Index for a project now has a new look, and has been reworked throughout. We now have much more experience of working with large projects, and have more feedback from users about what they found helpful and not in the old Index. In general, we have tried to improve navigation within the Index pages - each of which contains several different tables or charts - to pack more information into the existing tables, where sensibly possible, and to improve its visual recognisability - to make it easier to see at a glance where you are. Being lost in the Index is no better than being lost in the source text, the whole problem it's supposed to address. There are too many changes to itemise, but briefly: links to extensions from the Index pages now have a new icon (in place of the old footnotes like [E1]); clicking them jumps to the documentation for the extension; a new use option, "Use numbered rules", indexes rules with identifying numbers alongside their names, and causes the testing command RULES ALL to show these numbers at run-time - which may help in debugging when "Use memory economy" is enforced, so that RULES ALL is unable to quote rule names in full. CBLORB This build includes version 1.1 of "cblorb", and matching improvements to Inform's system for releasing projects. "cblorb" is an internal tool which is run at the end of the translation process, but only when the Release button rather than the Go or Replay buttons was clicked. It has two main jobs: to bind up the translated project, together with any pictures, sounds, or cover art, into a single file called a "blorb" which can be given to players on other machines to play; and to produce associated websites, solution files and so on as demanded by "Release..." instruction(s) in the source text. Previous builds of Inform included a minimal implementation of "cblorb" which, although it mostly worked, was really only a prototype: it was not really flexible or reliable enough to be used in the final system. We have long intended to replace it with a better implementation, and version 1.1 is our first draft of that. It is much faster (running in order N time, where N is the line count of the source text, not order N-cubed), and produces much better HTML. This also gave us the opportunity to reform how "Release" works, and to make it easier to produce tidy collections of release material. Almost all of the size or complexity limits have been taken out, and in particular: the number of audiovisual files embedded in the blorb, previously limited to about 495 (depending on circumstances), is now limited only by the Blorb specification limit of 32765; the number of auxiliary files, previously at most 50, is now unlimited; the numbers of tables and headings in a project released with source in a website, previously 250 each, are now unlimited; the number of knots in the Skein of a project released with a solution, previously at most 10000, is now unlimited; the story description length, previously at most 1000 characters, is now at most 2047 characters; and all filenames can be up to 2047 characters long, which should help if the project is very, very deep in the file system tree. Various minor bugs have been removed, of which the most important was a tendency to trim 8 bytes from the end of some audio files when embedding them, which caused some Ogg Vorbis files to be unplayable. The rendering of source text on an accompanying website is also improved somewhat, with various bugs to do with nested comments removed, and support for verbatim I6 code added; text substitutions are also now styled, and hanging indentation for code makes it much easier to read. Particular thanks to David Kinder, who diagnosed the Ogg Vorbis fault, and to Stephen Granade, whose "i7htmltidy.pl" script was a most effective critique of the original "cblorb". Internal changes include: there are several new placeholders: [PAGENUMBER] and [PAGEEXTENT], for pages in the multi-page source web pages, are such that "page [PAGENUMBER] of [PAGEEXTENT]" produces text such as "page 2 of 7"; [TEMPLATE] is the name of the web template in current use; [SMALLCOVER] is the filename of the thumbnail-sized version of the cover art file. (Compare [BIGCOVER], which already exists, and is the filename of the real thing.) [STORYFILE] becomes the "leafname" of the story file, e.g., "Bronze.gblorb" [GENERATOR] becomes the name of the program generating the website, e.g., "cblorb 1.2" [TIMESTAMP] and [DATESTAMP] are the time and date at which cblorb runs new command-line arguments "-trace", "-help"; the user interface is now expected to call with the first option being "-osx", "-windows", or "-unix" as appropriate; a new "style" command in Blurb locates the relevant CSS file to use when releasing with a website; "" tags generated by "cblorb" are now self-closing (""); "
" tags generated by "cblorb" are now self-closing ("
"); footnote anchors are now closed, preventing link style from spilling; paragraphs generated by "cblorb" are now always in matching "

...

" tags; links in the lists of links are now in "
  • ...
  • " list item tags in a surrounding "", and similarly for the contents listing in a source website, where nested