Exporting game text for spelling checks

I’d like to export my game text so I can put it into a word processor and run spelling checks on it.

I could do this in Inform 6, but I can’t find a similar option in Inform 7. I assume it’s me being dense as usual, but I’ve searched the general index for entries around the words ‘spelling’, ‘proofing’, ‘editing’, ‘export’, 'data files, etc without success.

If anyone can tell me how to do this I’d appreciate it.

Unfortunately there’s not a way built into I7. But the first step of compiling I7 is translating it into I6, which is saved in [project].materials/Build/auto.inf . So in theory you could extract the strings from that. (Or extract the strings from the finished Glulx or Zcode game, if you prefer.)

There’s also the Transcript tab in Inform 7, which you could copy and paste into the spell checker of choice or a site like Grammarly.

There’s also this tool, that extracts text fragments from a gblorb file http://toastball.net/glulx-strings/

Is there a reason you can’t copy/paste the source text directly where you want it to spellcheck?

Yes, the code is in there, but you could search for quotation marks and jump through it.

Unless you’re also checking grammar, I’d think most of the terms used in Inform are correctly spelled. Variables might get a little weird, but you can click “ignore” on those.

The Mac and Windows front-ends both have a built-in spell checker. (Not sure about whether the Linux front-end has one too.)

Yeah, there’s a live spell checker in linux.

If you are familiar with Python, I wrote a small script called “I7extract.py” that extracts all the strings of an Inform project and substitutes (as much as possible) the text substitions so that it’s easier to spell-check.

It’s quite bare-bones, but it’s functional. See the comment at the start of the file for instructions and missing features. I’ll try to update it the next time I’ll need it (which would be quite some time…).

The in-IDE spellcheck checks the code as well as the quoted string–but the good thing is that a lot of Inform code is properly spelled English words anyway, so you might not get too many false positives!