| VME basic zone writing manual | ||
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As you may have noticed, the string fields on the VME are formatted in an English paragraph style. What that means is all text is formatted with the following rules:
All leading blanks are stripped away. For room descriptions three leading spaces are added. This way, we ensure a consistent formatting of the displayed room descriptions.
Spaces and blanks (newlines) are contracted to single spaces yielding a correctly 'wrapped' text for any sentence.
If a '.' is encountered followed by a blank, a total of two spaces are inserted after the '.'.
These formatting rules are great for normal descriptions and extras; but, what if you want to make a sign or a map? You don't always want wrapped text. If the server wrapped your sign it would turn out looking like a jumble of punctuation in the form of a paragraph. Table 1 contains a list of all formatting characters and a short description of them. the Section called Formatting code descriptions and examples contains a more in depth discussion of each format command with examples and the Section called Color code descriptions and examples deals with the color commands.
Table 1. Formatting and color codes
| Code | Description |
|---|---|
| & | Used to make an ampersand, & character instead of an escape code. |
| l | Text from this point forward will not be formatted by the server. It will be interpreted literally with newlines, spaces, etc. Useful when making a sign or a map. |
| f | Text from this point forward will be formatted by the server. This option is the reverse of &l and is default on any section of text. |
| s<#> | Force a single space character (or <#> if specified, may come in handy, instead of having to toggle formatting). |
| n | Force a new line, very handy instead of toggling the &l formatting switch. |
| h | Clears the screen if the terminal of the user supports it. |
| x | A file new line used for split so that you can split a file into lines |
| c<color> | Set the foreground color. |
| b<color> | Set the background color. |
| [<color>] | Set a preset foreground and background color. |
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