Are there any shortcuts for typing character formatting in Inform?

Question

Typing [bold text] and so forth becomes really tiresome. Can this be cut down?

Comments

perhaps a question about the specifics of line breaks and text stuff is in order. It'd be nice to have a shortlist of all the things that cause them implicitly, ie, an item does this after it describes, a room description has these properties. I saw this sort of description in the docs, but it didn't have a lot of examples / ways to change this behaviour.

(I also think that doing things implicitly like that is bad, but that's none of my business.)

Answer 1

Yes.

to say b:
  say "[bold text]";

to say i:
  say "[italic text]";

to say r:
  say "[regular text]";

to say fl: [I always forget the precise wording here]
  say "[fixed letter spacing]";

to say vl: [here too]
  say "[variable letter spacing]";

to say ob:
  say "[bracket]";

to say cb:
  say "[close bracket]";

Also, one thing many people miss is that [apostrophe] can be shortened to ['].

Comments

Shortening paragraphs and line breaks are a bit iffier, as sometimes Inform throws in an extra line break. So these are a bit riskier.

    to say p:
      say "[paragraph break]";
    
    to say l:
      say "[line break]";

You may be able to get away with

to say l:
  (- print"^"; -)

Which forces a line break. p could be ^^.

---

My OCD still wants *.md support, like "[md] Stuff _only_ gets formatted inside *this* section, nowhere else.[dm]"