Preliminaries

• A Brief Guide to Foundation - Notes on getting started with the Foundation library.

Chapter 1: Setting Up

Absolute basics.

• Foundation Module - Starting up and shutting down.

• POSIX Platforms - A version of our operating system interface suitable for POSIX-compliant operating systems.

• Windows Platform - A version of our operating system interface suitable for Microsoft Windows.

Chapter 2: Memory, Streams and Collections

Creating objects in memory, and forming lists, hashes, and text streams.

• Debugging Log - To write to the debugging log, a plain text file which traces what we're doing, in order to assist those lost souls debugging it.

• Memory - To allocate memory suitable for the dynamic creation of objects of different sizes, placing some larger objects automatically into doubly linked lists and assigning each a unique allocation ID number.

• Locales - Locales are what operating-system people call the text encodings used when interacting with them: in filenames, or when printing to the console.

• Streams - Support for writing structured textual output, perhaps to the screen, to a file, or to a flexible-sized wide string.

• Writers and Loggers - Formatted text output to streams.

• Methods - General support for something approximating method calls.

• Linked Lists and Stacks - A simple implementation for single-linked lists of objects allocated by Foundation's memory manager, and for last-in-first-out stacks of same.

• Dictionaries - A simple implementation for a flexible-sized dictionary of key-value pairs.

• Trees - To provide heterogeneous tree structures, where a node can be any structure known to the Foundation memory manager.

Chapter 3: The Operating System

Dealing with the host operating system.

• Error Messages - A basic system for command-line tool error messages.

• Command Line Arguments - To parse the command line arguments with which inweb was called, and to handle any errors it needs to issue.

• Pathnames - Locations of hypothetical or real directories in the filing system.

• Filenames - Names of hypothetical or real files in the filing system.

• Case-Insensitive Filenames - On some of the Unix-derived file systems on which Inform runs, filenames are case-sensitive, so that FISH and fish might be different files. This makes extension files, installed by the user, prone to being missed. The code in this section provides a routine to carry out file opening as if filenames are case-insensitive, and is used only for extensions.

• Shell - Sending commands to the shell, on Unix-like platforms, or simulating this on Windows.

• Directories - Scanning directories on the host filing system.

• Time - Managing how we record and use the current time and date.

Chapter 4: Text Handling

Reading, writing and parsing text.

• Characters - Individual characters.

• C Strings - A minimal library for handling C-style strings.

• Wide Strings - A minimal library for handling wide C strings.

• String Manipulation - Convenient routines for manipulating strings of text.

• Tab Stops - Reading strings where tab characters need to be interpreted as if spaces had been used for the same visual effect.

• Textual Tables - Simple plain-text tabulations, for reporting to the console.

• Text Files - To read text files of whatever flavour, one line at a time.

• Preprocessor - A simple, general-purpose preprocessor for text files, expanding macros and performing repetitions.

• Tries and Avinues - To examine heads and tails of text, to see how it may inflect.

• Finite State Machines - To provide simple scanning parsers based on finite state machines.

• Pattern Matching - To provide a limited regular-expression parser.

• JSON - To read, validate and write JSON data interchange material.

Chapter 5: Generating Websites

For making individual web pages, or gathering them into mini-sites or ebooks.

• HTML - Utility functions for writing HTML.

• HTML Entities - Utility functions for dealing with those ampersanded paraphrases of characters which seemed like a good idea in around the year 2000.

• Markdown - To store the results of parsing the Markdown markup notation.

• Markdown Phase I - Phase I of the Markdown parser: reading a series of lines into a tree of container and leaf blocks.

• Markdown Phase II - Phase II of the Markdown parser: fragmenting inline material into emphasis, links, backticked code and so forth.

• Markdown Rendering - To render a Markdown tree as HTML.

• Markdown Variations - To specify modified versions of the Markdown markup syntax.

• Inform-Flavoured Markdown - A form of Markdown adapted to the needs of the Inform tools.

• Epub Ebooks - To provide for wrapping up sets of HTML files into ePub ebooks.

Chapter 6: Media

Examining image and sound files.

• Binary Files - Routines for reading raw data from binary files.

• Image Dimensions - These utility routines look at the headers of JPEG and PNG files to find the pixel dimensions of any images supplied by the user for cover art and figures.

• Sound Durations - These utility routines look at the headers of AIFF, OGG Vorbis or MIDI files to find the durations, and verify that they are what they purport to be.

Chapter 7: Semantic Versioning

For reading, storing and comparing standard semantic version numbers.

• Version Numbers - Semantic version numbers such as 3.7.1.

• Version Number Ranges - Ranges of acceptable version numbers.

• Licence Data - Storing names and standard SPDX identifiers for common open source licences.

• SPDX Licences - This section was mechanically generated from the JSON file provided by https://spdx.org/licenses/. The version used was 747753e, dated 2024-04-24.