A brief user guide.

§1. Inrtps is a one-trick pony: its trick is to turn simple textual messages into HTML pages suitable for display inside the Inform user interface application. These are used mainly for run-time problems, which are the RTPs included in the name.

A run-time problem occurs, for instance, if a story file generated by Inform tries to divide by 0. The story file will then print up a run-time problem message of a very concise kind, like so:

    *** Run-time problem P17: You can't divide by zero.

(P17 is the "code number" for the message.) If the story file is running in a typical interpreter, that will be the end of the matter, but if it runs in the Inform application's built-in interpreter then the appearance of such text will be noticed and will cause Inform to open a suitably explanatory page in the panel alongside Game. This will be an HTML page called

    RTP_P17.html

kept in a folder somewhere inside the application. Clearly there will be a fair number of possible errors, and we don't want to have to build these HTML pages by hand. Inrtps automates their generation.

§2. If you have compiled the standard distribution of the command-line tools for Inform then the Inrtps executable will be at inrtps/Tangled/inrtps. Usage is very simple:

    $ inrtps/Tangled/inrtps FROM TO [OPTIONS]

The first two arguments are names of folders. The only useful option is -font, which can be used to force an avoidance of CSS (see below). At present this is used only on the Windows build of Inform.

Inpolicy can be run from anywhere in the file system and does not need to know where it's installed.

§3. The FROM folder is expected to contain two files:

    FROM/model.html
    FROM/texts.txt

The texts file is a plain text file explaining each RTP in turn. The first line of an RTP has a special format identifying it: the remaining lines give the explanation, and a skipped (i.e., blank) line divides each RTP from the next. For instance:

    P17 - Can't divide by zero
    A number cannot be divided by 0: similarly, we cannot take the remainder
    after dividing something by 0.

The model file is a standard HTML file, except that it can contain four escape codes, which Inrtps expands. Thus:

• (a) *1 expands to the code number of the message.
• (b) *2 expands to the full textual explanation.
• (c) *3 expands to a short title for the message.
• (d) *4 expands to font settings inside a <font ...> tag. (This will be blank if nofont is set, or will choose a Helvetica-like font if font is set.)