I want to know if there is a method to write indented words without giving out error, the indent will be used to differ narrative words and dialogue words
an example of what I’d like to achieve,
would be great if it’s possible, thank you
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Unfortunately, there is no way to add indentations to text in ChoiceScript. This is mainly because allowing a writer to indent text could lead to bugs, since ChoiceScript heavily uses indentation for commands.
ChoiceScript does not allow extra spaces or a tab (“indentation”) before the first word of each new paragraph as commonly used in such as a “proper English” paper novel. This is because ChoiceScript uses indentation for scripting purposes within each scene file, so adding extra indenting to paragraphs of narrative would cause a game-stopping error.
-Basic Scene Scripting - ChoiceScript Wiki
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that’s too bad, but thank you for clarifying it out
No problem. I also had a lot of interesting ideas that were shut down by the limitations of ChoiceScript. I think the language really needs richer text customization.
At the same time though, ChoiceScript’s simplicity makes it so that any writer can pick it up, and adding too many “power features” would make it more of a language for experienced programmers instead of normal writers who want to try their hand in interactive fiction.
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What do you want to achieve with this formatting?
There are likely workarounds to get the effect
I just want to show the dialogues at certain indentation, differing it with narrative words, I read many WIPs here and when there is dialogue or someone speak something, it blends with narrative words and doesn’t look good to me, I think it needs its own part on the page so I wanna separate them.
purely for visual stuffs to ease the readers, nothing too technical
I see.
However, you should be aware that having a ‘script’ format such as this might have the opposite effect on readers, as it rips someone from the immersion.
We recently had releases that in one case had ALL the MC’s dialogue be a choice, throwing some (not all) readers off, and in another the common
"dialogue"
markings where replaced by
- dialogue
throwing readers off as well.
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Here’s a unicode hack to add spaces: copy + paste the word joiner unicode character ( - Word Joiner: U+2060 - Unicode Character Table) at the beginning of the line, before any spaces. And instead of using regular spaces, try using the em space character ( - Em Space: U+2003 emsp - Unicode Character Table) - just copy and paste the spaces that you need. You won’t see anything change in the text editor, but if you run the server, you’ll see the spaces show up.
(I was going to copy-paste it here but discourse breaks it)
But hacks aside, I agree with the previous point. A big issue is that indents do not look good on mobile.
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