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Start of Chapter 1: Welcome to Inform |
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Back to §1.2. Acknowledgements |
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Onward to §1.4. The Go! button |
Inform 7 Home Page / Documentation
§1.3. The facing pages
On most computers, Inform runs in a single main window which is an opened book showing two facing pages. As we shall see it behaves as if these pages are in dialogue with each other: for the most part we write on the left hand page and see responses appear on the right. But all is controllable. The margin between the two pages can be dragged back and forth like the slide on a trombone: each page can be made smaller that the other may grow larger. Moreover, each page can display one of a number of displays relevant to the current project, called "panels", one of them being the Documentation panel which displays a screen-readable copy of this manual. The vertical strip of choices at the right hand margin of each page allows you to choose between panels. (The same panel can be showing on both pages at the same time, if that's useful.)
At the start the only panels available are a blank space in which to write the first lines of a new interactive fiction - the Source panel - and this one, the Documentation. Clicking on the other choices will do nothing.
The exception is the Settings panel, which contains some preference settings for the individual project - not the whole application. This is always available, but it controls settings which can be left alone almost all of the time.