Inform Beginner's Guide ======================= Introduction ------------ This repository contains the sources for an updated version of the [Inform Beginner's Guide](http://www.firthworks.com/roger/IBG.html), henceforth known as the IBG. This version is in a new source format that's more version-control and contributor-friendly: [Sphinx](http://sphinx-doc.org), a documentation build tool written in [Python](http://python.org). With Sphinx, the source files are in a very readable format called [reStructuredText](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReStructuredText). This version of the IBG is a work-in-progress; see the [issue tracker](https://github.com/i6/ibg/issues) for how it's going. Initially it will be a straight conversion of the 3rd edition. After that, the 4th edition will be prepared. The rationale for a 4th edition is: * There have been quite a few updates to Inform and its support libraries in the time since 2004, when the 3rd edition was published. * The nitty-gritty information about how to install and run programs goes stale pretty fast. * Some old web links have gone away, to be replaced by new and better ones. If you want a preview of how the online HTML version of the new guide looks, you can find it [here](http://inform-beginners-guide.readthedocs.org). Building from source -------------------- As well as these document sources, you will need: * Sphinx. You can find the complete installation instructions [here](http://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/stable/install.html). * [Blockdiag](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/blockdiag) is used for some of the diagrams. * To create the HTML version, you'll need a recent (>=0.7.8) version of the [Alabaster](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/alabaster) theme. If you have `pip`, this command will be all you need: pip install -U sphinx blockdiag alabaster After you have everything installed, you can build the HTML version of the guide from a command prompt, like this: make html For building the PDF version, you need a reasonably recent installation of TeX Live. Release 2014 will do. You will also need the Emerald font package from https://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/fonts/emerald/. This cannot be installed with `tlmgr`, nor does it seem to be packaged by the usual Linux or BSD distributions. Scripts for installing and uninstalling Emerald are provided in the `tools` directory. When you're ready, type this: make latexpdf Other formats are available; just type `make` for more details.