TADS 3 Wiki Coming soon...

Howdy,

I’d just like to take a moment to announce that I will be hosting a wiki site about the TADS 3 programming language (similar to my hugo wiki).

As I’m very new to using Tads, it’s going to be slow going. I’ve still got a few things to set up on the back end, but soon the wiki will go live.

The site is at http://tads3.gerynarsabode.org

(to get a taste of what I hope it will be like, check out http://hugo.gerynarsabode.org)

It will probably be slow going depending on the help (if any) I get on creating pages but I hope to make it a useful resource for those of us wanting to learn how to use Tads 3, the standard adv3 library and/or the adv3Lite library by Eric Eve,

The more, the merrier! This could be a great resource. Of course, Eric Eve has written an enormous amount of documentation for both T3 and T3lite – but even so, I’m sure people will benefit from additional examples, tips, explanations of pitfalls, the perspective and techniques of a different author, and so on.

I’ve written several games in T3. Right now I’m learning T3lite (that is, adv3lite) while writing a new game. They’re rather different systems. The code syntax is all identical, because the TADS 3 compiler is the same – but the usages are rather different. I hope you’ll include a wiki page that gives details on the differences, and perhaps some mild advice on which to choose.

I would also suggest a page on writing TADS 3 games on the Mac. It can be done, and basic instructions are included in the docs, but you kind of have to know where to find the instructions. A dedicated page on this topic would be useful.

I’ve already created a graphic image and a template on the wiki to mark things that are standard lib (adv3) and adv3Lite lib. working on setting up some other templates and syntax highlighting for TADS code. Don’t know how much I’d be able to do for Mac, but I use Linux and I believe that FrobTads isn’t horribly different on either system (Mac/Linux)

Been so long since I’ve set up my hugo wiki that I’m finding that I have much to re-learn about setting up certain styles and templates and whatnot.

I also think this site will make a great excuse to procrastinate on my WIPs.

EDIT:
Also need to figure out why the CSS styles disappear once in a while, making for an ugly wiki page.

Great, look forward to seeing your wiki grow.

For my $.02, where I think you could have the most impact to start—and would be a great way for you to become familiar with the TADS programming environment—is to provide a kind of road map into the existing doc set, which is quite extensive, but also quite fragmented (docs are not updated or corrected in synch, so one will say one thing, another something else) and itself undocumented (little to no indexing, little to no cross references).

The original docs for TADS3—the System Manual and Technical Manual—are HTML docs that are not indexed and therefore very difficult to use as reference material. Then there is the Learning TADS3 document that is indexed, but, since it’s a PDF, the indexed passages are not easily accessible from a browser.

On the adv3lite side (my own area of interest, since that’s the library I’ve used to create two games, one released the other in beta), there is the Adv3Lite Library Manual, an HTML doc that is indexed, and the Adv3Lite Tutorial, an HTML doc that is not indexed.

That latter doc, the tutorial, contains a wealth of information that is largely unusable once you’ve read through it, because the only way to find that gem of a passage you’re sure you recall seeing that you just know is related to your current problem is to read the entire document again—if you even remember that it’s the tutorial, and not the manual, or the Learning T3 pdf, that contains the golden prose you seek.

Compounding the problem is that each of these docs has its own timeframe—they were written at different times, with somewhqat different understandings, and they are not always in synch with current implementations.

One book will say one thing, another will put it somewhat differently, and another will be simply incorrect. Your wiki would be extremely useful if it could help sort out all of those inconsistencies. Even just a pointer to all of the various places where something like sayDeparting() (to site an example that was just discussed in a recent thread on this forum) is defined in the Adv3Lite docs.

Some kind of uber index to all these disparate sources of information would be ideal, though admittedly a lot of work, but nonetheless a noble goal for a wiki such as yours.

So, other than kibbitzes from bystanders like me, what kind of help are you looking to get from this forum?

Jerry

Great suggestion, Jerry! One of the things that initially baffled me about T3 (back in 2005) was how to find things in the documentation. Even the names System Manual and Technical Manual are not very explanatory.

I would note, however, that I almost always run the Learning pdf in my browser and use the Find command, not the index. But that works best if you already know that you’re looking for a particular code term, such as notImportantMsg.

Not being a wikian, I have no idea how to insert text into any of the pages in the wiki. I clicked on Help in the left margin, and there was no help for me.

I don’t think he has user registration enabled yet (usually it’s in the upper right hand corner).

Yeah, some kind of ‘if you want to…’ page with links to the docs for each topic would be really cool. You can search across most (all?) of the T3 docs but like Jim said sometimes you need to know what you’re looking for.

No, user registration not available yet, checking on a couple of extensions to help reduce spam before opining it up. Of course, it’ll be free of charge, I expect within the next couple of days before it’s open to new users.

Gerynar, if I were you I’d consider only allowing registration if people post in a thread here.Wiki spam seems like a big hassle in my experience.

OK,

Let’s do a beta. PM me your email address, and what you’d like your username to be and I’ll create an account for you at the TADS 3 Wiki, I will set up an account and email a temporary password that I’d highly recommend that you change right away.

Gerynar:

I poked around on the Wiki site for a while; pretty sparse at the moment but that’s to be expected.

I was hoping I would be able to just upload some existing pages I’ve generated over the past year or so for my own purposes in an ongoing attempt to bring some order to the TADS docset in my own little world. I’ve developed some tools (in Java) that extract information from the official docs and organize it into special cheat sheets—things like a list of all Actor properties, another of all Conversation object types and properties, and yet another listing all BMsg and DMsg macros, and I’ve generated indexes for the System and Technical Manuals and Adv3Lite Tutorial using a set of index tags that are of interest to me.

But all of these things are generated as HTML pages. I thought I would be able to upload these pages as they currently exist, thinking that others might get some value out of them. But when I tried, the Wiki views them as simply text, with all of the HTML markup displayed as text rather than interpreted as markup tags.

Is there some kind of switch you can throw to make the Wiki render HTML? Or does everything have to be written fresh in the Wiki editor? That may limit somewhat the amount and kind of contributions that can be put up on the site.

Jerry

(Oh, and BTW, maybe I’m impatient, but I entered my e-mail address on the preferences page and the Wiki advised me that it would not be active until I respond to the e-mail automatically sent to me by the Wiki confirming that it is in fact my email. But I have not yet received the confirmation email the Wiki said it had sent. I double checked, the email address I entered is correct. Am I just not giving it sufficient time?)

Because I created your account, you are automatically verified. I’ve got to research as to why the wiki won’t send emails.

As to uploading your code, it might be easiest to create a page (such as Actor Properties), then copy/paste your html code into the wiki editor box.

Then, at the bottom, add [[Category:Adv3]] if it’s about the standard library’s version of the Actor class, or [[Category:Lite]] if it’s about the adv3Lite library actor class. This will automatically add it to the said category that users can link to from the sidebar.

I tried copying and pasting the html into the Wiki editor box, but when I clicked the preview button it was displayed as raw text, html markup and all, not a rendered page.

Jerry

Try this link:
labs.seapine.com/htmltowiki.cgi

Paste your html into the top edit box, and in the lower box, it will output the same info in mediawiki markup.

Then, copy and paste the wiki markup into the page editor at the T3Wiki

Hmmm. Not working. I copy the page source and paste it into the editor box, but the bottom “converted” box remains empty.

The page source is XHTML, not simple HTML. Could that be the problem?

(My utility actually generates CSV, which I then open in Open Office and export as HTML—or rather, as noted, XHTML.0)

Try copying just the info between the body tags (excluding the body tags themselves).

If that doesn’t work, email me the files and I’ll manually convert them and post them.

reokid70 -at- gmail dot com

I’m going to need to redo some stuff before posting it, then. The files as they currently exist have a lot of sytlesheet data preceding the body tag. Without that style info, it’s still going to be a mishmash of raw text.

I’ll need to work on it some more, maybe get my extraction utility to generate something more directly usable without conversion through Open Office, then I’ll try posting again.

Thanks.

Jerry

jford,

After a bit of Googling, I’ve found that OpenOffice versions > 2.4 can export to wiki format. So, you might want to look into that. (Tested it very briefly in LibreOffice, and it seemed to work fine.)

I’ve installed the MediaWiki extension into Open Office and have copied (cut/paste-special) the spreadsheet data into a text document (which is what I believe to be the correct procedure).

When I select Send to MediaWiki, I get a connection dialog, which I fill out, but when I enter my Wiki user name and password—which do work on the Wiki site—Open Office fails to send, with an Incorrect username/password message.

Jerry

Under the File->Export, you should have the option to save the file in MediaWiki format (as a text file) that can then be copied and pasted into the edit box of the article you’re interested in editing/creating.

Having never used the extension, I’m not sure how to help. The only thing I can think of is if it’s trying to upload to mediawiki.org (the developers of the MediaWiki engine), or if there’s a place where you can enter the URL of the wiki you want to upload to.