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From: Bruce Stephens <bruce@liverpool.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: Portability of games (was Re: Limitations of Inform and TADS?)
In-Reply-To: kinder@teaching.physics.ox.ac.uk's message of 13 Nov 95 10:02:20 GMT
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Date: Wed, 15 Nov 1995 12:04:38 GMT
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>>>>> "David" == David Kinder <kinder@teaching.physics.ox.ac.uk> writes:

> From my recent experience of adding this to an interpreter, it's
> nowhere near as difficult as it initially looks. I do it by having
> two fonts; one proportional and one fixed width, but both of the
> same height. All movement routines are done relative to the size of
> the fixed width font.  You generally need to replace the
> interpreter's code for splitting lines of text, but for things like
> quotation boxes or status lines, Inform always makes sure that the
> "USE_NON_PROP_FONT" bit in the header is set at the appropriate
> point. This does mean that the game could mess up the display, but
> everthing I've looked at worked fine (except MST3K, and that's only
> a slight cosmetic problem).

Yes, I've just read zmach05.txt, and the descriptions there seem
compatible: the width of a font is the width of the 0 (ASCII 48), and
positions are defined according to that.
-- 
Bruce                   Institute of Advanced Scientific Computation
bruce@liv.ac.uk   University of Liverpool
http://supr.scm.liv.ac.uk/~bruce/

