Inform Syntax Styling For Windows

Version 0.2 January 31st 1999 John G. Wood

This is a collection of sample C++ code for syntax styling Graham Nelson's Inform. In his original post, Graham referred to this as syntax colouring; I have generalised "colour" to "style" since I allow the use of italic and bold text as well as colour when presenting this. The code is organised into packages, so you can use as little or as much as you like - the various packages are described below. If you just want to see how it works in practice, run the sample application InformViewer.exe and open an Inform source file (one is provided).

I hereby release this into the public domain; if you find it useful, I would appreciate it if you could let me know. A mention in the credits would be nice too, but it's entirely up to you.

This is the second public release and it is very much alpha - any reports of problems (other than those mentioned below) will be gratefully received. My thanks (of course) to Graham Nelson for doing all the hard parts - coming up with the language, compiler, and algorithm in the first place!

John


Inform And If

If you don't know Inform, this will be completely useless to you. Inform is a language for writing Interactive Fiction (IF, or "text adventures") - for more information try one of the following:


The Files

There are a few auxiliary files in this distribution:

The rest of the files are source files or else files necessary to build the sample application (InformViewer.exe, also included). These fit together as follows, with packages lower in the diagram depending on those higher up. Best in a non-proportional font:

            +-----------------------+
            | 0. STYLE DEFINITIONS  |
            |-----------------------|
            | InformStyle.h         |
            +-----------+-----------+
                        |                 Windows/MFC
               +--------+-------+             |
               |                |             |      
 +-------------+-------+  +-----+-------------+-----+
 | 1. SYNTAX STYLING   |  | 2. STYLE PRESENTATION   |
 |---------------------|  |-------------------------|
 | InformStyler.h,cpp  |  | InformStyleRecord.h,cpp |
 +-------------+-------+  +----+---------------+----+
               |               |               |     
               |               | +-------------+-------------+
               |               | | 2a. STYLE OPTIONS DIALOG  |
               |               | |---------------------------|
               |               | | InformStyleDlg.h,cpp  *   |
               |               | +-------------+-------------+
               |               |               |
          +----+---------------+----+          |
          | 3. STYLED EDIT CONTROL  |          |
          |-------------------------|          |
          | InformEditCtrl.h,cpp    |          |
          +-------------------+-----+          |
                              |                |
                         +----+----------------+----+
                         | 4. SAMPLE APPLICATION    |
                         |--------------------------|
                         | InformViewer.h,cpp,ds*   |
                         | InformViewerDoc.h,cpp    |
                         | InformViewerView.h,cpp   |
                         | MainFrm.h,cpp            |
                         | Resource.h               |
                         | StdAfx.h,cpp             |
                         | res/InformViewer.ico     |
                         | res/InformViewerDoc.ico  |
                         | res/Toolbar.bmp          |
                         +--------------------------+

* But see also InformViewer.rc and resource.h for dialog resources.


The Packages

0. Style Definitions

"InformStyle.h" simple contains an enumeration of the possible syntax styles (Foreground, Quoted Text, etc) from GN's algorithm.

I have added two new styles, Number and CodeNumber, for my own benefit. These are used for constant integers (decimal, hexadecimal or binary) in declarations and in code respectively.

1. Syntax Styling

The InformStyler class encapsulates the state machine from GN's algorithm (modified as described in "Algorithm.txt"). Its only significant public method is ColourString(), which builds up a map of styles for a given text string.

ColourString() is not optimised for speed, but it takes less than a second on my P166 to process a 4400+ line Inform file one line at a time.

Note that this code requires neither Windows nor MFC (although you would have to dummy a few type definitions such as LPCTSTR to use it in another environment).

2. Style Presentation

The InformStyleRecord class contains the visual representation information for one style - colour, bold and italic - plus a text name for the benefit of the style options dialog. The InformStyle enum entry is referred to as the record's ID.

Also defined is a mapping class InformStyleRecordSet from IDs to records. There is a global object of this type accessible via GetMasterStyles().

2a. Style Options Dialog

The CInformStyleDlg class is simply a dialog box which allows the user to customise the style presentation. Pass it an InformStyleRecordSet on construction and it will do the rest. See "InformViewer.cpp" for an example of using this.

Note that this requires the dialog resources from the sample application - it should be easy enough to copy them across.

3. Styled Edit Control

The CInformEditCtrl class is derived from a rich edit control. It currently has one interesting method, SetText(). This sets the text of the control then colours it using an Inform syntax styler and the master style set. To ease styling when the text is edited, I store the style's state for the start of each line.

This is the least satisfactory package. In version 0.1 the 4400+ line Inform file mentioned above took over TWO MINUTES to prepare on my P166; it now takes less than three seconds, but in order to do this I have had to produce RTF codes by hand, which has made the code quite messy.

The other problem is that I have only implemented it as a viewer. If the text is edited it will be wrongly styled unless the whole text is processed again.

I hope to do something about both these problems in future releases but thought it was worth releasing in it's current state anyway.

4. Sample Application

InformViewer.exe is a simple SDI application that allows you to view syntax-styled Inform files. CInformViewerDoc just reads files into a CString accessible to its views; CInformViewerView maintains a styled edit control filling it's client area and updates the text when necessary. CInformViewerApp does three things of interest:

  1. It loads the master styles from the registry (if preferences have been written into the registry) in InitInstance();
  2. It saves the master styles to the registry in ExitInstance();
  3. It handles the "Tools|Syntax styles" command, updating all views in all documents if the styles have changed.

This page originally found at http://www.elvwood.org/InteractiveFiction/Readme.html
Last updated: 14 March 2002

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