How does one properly format italics/bold text in title entries in Menus by Emily Short?

Question

I'm noticing some odd behavior when italicizing and bolding text in the title entries of a menu created by the Menus extension in Glulx. Consider this code:

Include Menus by Emily Short.

Blank is a room.

When play begins:
    now the current menu is the Table of Issue;
    carry out the displaying activity;
    clear the screen.

Table of Issue
title   subtable    description toggle
"Foo"   --  ""  --
"[italic type]Bar[roman type]"  --  ""  --
"Baz"   --  ""  --
"Qux"   --  ""  --

In the game proper, the menu titles after the italicized one have a different style and aren't indented properly. This also happens for bold text.

Is there are a way to use italics or bold text in titles while having the formatting remain consistent?

Answer 1

The menu format relies on a fixed-width font to match up indentations. In your example, "Foo" does appear in fixed letter spacing. Inform doesn't have a font that's both fixed-width and italic, though, so "Bar" appears in variable-spaced italics.

When you say "[roman type]" you're telling the game to write in variable-spaced type from that point on, so that's how "Baz" and "Qux" appear. The indentation is messed up because it consists of a certain number of spaces, which are thinner in the variable-spaced type than they are in the fixed-width type used above.

If you replace "[roman type]" with "[fixed letter spacing]" in your example, the table is indented properly.

Comments

Or in other words, the extension assumes at the start of each line that it is set to fixed letter spacing. The extension should probably be updated to remove this assumption and just change the font itself each time. (It's what I did with my rewrite of Menus.)