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From: erkyrath@netcom.com (Andrew Plotkin)
Subject: Re: Could the Z-machine Interpreter be a book reader?
Message-ID: <erkyrathDz4Dny.LJ6@netcom.com>
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Date: Fri, 11 Oct 1996 16:26:22 GMT
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rbram@cris.com wrote:
> Hi, I'm sure the answer to this is in the manuals, and I've been meaning
> to read them...

It does make life easier.

> but, how complicated would it be to take an electronic book and compile it
> into a ZIP readable "game". So you could download your book as a .z3 or
> .z5 file into your PDA and take it with you to read using a Z-interpreter.

It would be very simple. The details depend on how your document is 
formatted. It would be a fairly trivial hack to (say) parse an
HTML file and turn it into a Inform source file that contains one
function which just prints the thing. (You'd be ignoring all the tags
except bold, italics, line and paragraph breaks, of course. In .z5. In 
.z6 you get graphics... :-))

Do this for a bunch of files, and then compile them all with a menu front 
end.

--Z

-- 

"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."
