Glulx Text Effects provides an easy way to set up special text effects for Glulx.

Chapter 1: Styles in Glulx

Unlike the Z-Machine, which allows arbitrary combinations of features (such as color and boldness) to be applied to text, Glulx requires the author to define and then use text styles.

There are eleven of these styles:

Table of styles

normal-style	the style used for regular text
italic-style	used for italic text (this is what the "[italic type]" phrase uses)
bold-style	used for bold text (this is what the "[bold type]" phrase uses)
fixed-letter-spacing-style	used for monospaced text (this is what the "[fixed letter spacing]" phrase uses)
alert-style	used when printing an end of game message such as "*** You have died. ***"
blockquote-style	used for printing box quotations
header-style	used to print the title of the game
input-style	used for the player's own input
note-style	used for messages such as "[Your score has increased by one point.]"
special-style-1	these two styles are not used by Inform, and you are free to use them for any purpose you want
special-style-2

Additionally, when defining styles you can set "all-styles" which will define all eleven styles at once.

Chapter 2: Style features

Each text style has the following features:

Table of style features

background color	specifies the background color of the text
color	specifies the color of the text itself
fixed width	a truth state (default: false). If true then the text will be displayed with a fixed width (monospace) font
font weight	specifies the weight of the font. Can be set to "light-weight", "regular-weight" (the default), or "bold-weight"
indentation	a number (default: 0) specifying the number of units of indentation for the whole block of text. Units are defined by interpreter, but are often equivalent to spaces
first line indentation	a number (default: 0) specifying additional indentation for the first line of the text block
italic	a truth state (default: false). If true then the text will be displayed in italics
justification	can be set to "left-justified", "center-justified", "right-justified", or "left-right-justified" for justified on the left and right (often called full justification)
relative size	a number (default: 0) specifying how many font sizes above or below the browser's default a style should be set to
reversed	a truth state (default: false). If true then the foreground and background colors of the text will be reversed. This is most commonly used for the status line

Not all interpreters support all of these features. Notably, Gargoyle does not support justification or font sizes. If the interpreter does not support one of the features it will just be quietly ignored.

Chapter 3: Defining styles

To define the features each style should have, add a table continuation to the Table of User Styles in your code. For example:

Table of User Styles (continued)

style name	color	italic	relative size
all-styles	"#FF0000"	true	--
header-style	"#0000FF"	false	1
special-style-1	"#00FF00"

This definition table above will make everything red and italics, except for the title which will be blue and a size bigger. Special style 1 is set to green, but it won't be used without the author manually turning it on.

Your table continuation does not need to include every column in the Table of User Styles, nor does it need to define every style. You can also continue the table multiple times, and even define a style in multiple places; if you do then the definitions will be combined together. If you do not want to set a feature for a style you can leave it blank with "--".

Colors are defined by specifying a web (CSS) color in a text. Web colors specify the red/green/blue components of a color in hexadecimal, and a correctly specified color will be 6 characters long (with an optional # at the beginning.) Note that short (#000) web colors are not supported.

If you use a color many times you can define it as a text constant, and then use that in the table:

Red is always "#FF0000".

Table of User Styles (continued)

style name	color
special-style-1	red

Chapter 4: Using the styles

You may invoke the text styles by using the following phrases

Table of style phrases

normal-style	"[roman type]"
italic-style	"[italic type]"
bold-style	"[bold type]"
fixed-letter-spacing-style	"[fixed letter spacing]" (Return to regular variable spaced type with either "[variable letter spacing]" or just "[roman type]")
alert-style	"[alert style]"
blockquote-style	"[blockquote style]"
header-style	"[header style]"
input-style	"[input style]"
note-style	"[note style]"
special-style-1	"[special-style-1]", "[first special style]", or "[first custom style]" (there are multiple options to support older code)
special-style-2	"[special-style-2]", "[second special style]", or "[second custom style]"

Chapter 5: About this extension

This extension was originally by Emily Short. Version 5 was rewritten by Dannii Willis.

The latest version of this extension can be found at <https://github.com/i7/extensions>. This extension is released under the Creative Commons Attribution licence. Bug reports, feature requests or questions can be made at <https://github.com/i7/extensions/issues>.

A	Example Gaudy A visually overpowering exercise in modifying all the built-in text styles.

B	Example The Gallic War An excuse to print a large, fancily-formatted bit of text using custom styles.