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Start of Chapter 2: The Source Text |
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Back to §2.4. Problems |
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Onward to §2.6. Why using headings is a good idea |
Inform 7 Home Page / Documentation
§2.5. Headings
Once the source grows beyond 1000 words or so, it can all too easily become disorganised, and by the time it reaches the size of a novella it can be difficult to find things. (Though nearly all editors provide a Find function, and the keyboard short-cuts Command-F (Mac OS X) or Ctrl-F (Windows) do the trick in the Inform application.)
Inform provides for us to organise the source code in just the way that a printed book would be organised: with headings and subheadings. Firstly, we can put the title at the top. If the first paragraph consists only of a single quoted piece of text, then that's the title; and an author can also be given, as follows:
We will later see that more bibliographic information can also be placed here, in the same way that the imprint page of a novel comes before the text gets going. The author's name can normally be given without quotation marks, so long as it contains no punctuation. For instance:
needs quotes as otherwise the full stop after the K will be mistaken for the end of a sentence.
A sentence which is the only one in its paragraph and which begins with any of the words "volume", "book", "part", "chapter" or "section" is considered to be a heading or a sub-heading. It must not contain a typed line break, and in order to stand alone in its paragraph there should be a skipped line both before and after it. For instance:
Headings can be written in any format, provided they start with one of the five indicator words, and they are hierarchical: a "Part ..." heading is considered more significant than a "Chapter ..." heading but not so significant as a "Book ..." heading, and so on. (We do not need to use all five kinds of heading.)