I learned about Inform 7 a couple of days ago, but I’ve only just now gotten the chance to spend much time looking into it. The more I looked, the more astonished I became. My breathing got all short and gaspy. I began to curse a lot, as I sometimes do under the influence of intense amazement.
I downloaded. I installed. I started a project, spontaneously titled “Earth And Sky’s Day Off.” I wrote a room description. I… encountered a bug. With literally the first sentence of the first description I wrote. My code begins:
Living Room is a room. "Your parents' living room is nothing if not tasteful.
Unfortunately, I7’s interpreter engine renders this as:
Living Room Your parents" living room is nothing if not tasteful.
Bah. I tried a couple of methods of escaping characters (\’ and ”) but no dice. I searched the documentation for the word “apostrophe” and found this:
Apostrophes used to contracted speech at the end of words are wrongly converted to double-quotes: thus “Lucy snaps, ‘What’s the matter? You don’t trust my cookin’ mister?'” has the apostrophe in “cookin'” wrongly converted. For now, best avoid such contractions.
Hrm. But… but… Hrm. Perhaps I should take the word “Beta” more seriously.
(Please note: I am not not NOT intending to slag off everybody’s years of hard and brilliant work with a two-second dismissal. I still have a huge crush on Inform 7 and will continue exploring it. It’s just that encountering a lacuna so quickly was a bit… deflating, is all.)
emshort
Actually, it’s been pointed out by someone ingenious that you can force a unicode apostrophe in that case. Which is a *bit* inelegant, but does give you the functionality, at least. [unicode 39] should do it. If you want, you can write a shortcut for this:
To say ‘:
say “[unicode 39]”.
and then the text could read “Your parents[‘] living…”
paulobrian
Yay workaround! Thanks for the insta-techsupport, Emily.