Roger Firth's IF pages
Informary -- Inform 6 commands

Inform, a popular and powerful design system for interactive fiction, is described on Graham Nelson's Inform 6 home page. The definitive documentation for game writers is Graham's Inform Designer's Manual, available in PDF format.

These pages -- the Informary -- are a supplement to the Designer's Manual. They attempt to provide a succinct summary of common Inform commands (though, as you'll see, brevity is one of the more obvious casualties). All of the information here is derived from the Third Edition (16May97) of the Designer's Manual and the system files defined by the banner Inform v6.21 Library 6/10, though of course all of the errors and (many) omissions are entirely my own.

There are two main ways of locating information. All of the entries are given in alphabetical order, so you can jump directly to a specific block of data. Alternatively, you can follow one of the fifteen threads which link entries of the same type into chains.

Alphabetic:

 symbols   A   B   C   D   E   F   G   H   I   J   K   L   M   N   O   P   Q   R   S   T   U   V   W   X   Y   Z 

Threads:

 actions (group 1)   actions (group 2)   actions (group 3)   attributes   constants   directives   entry points   fake actions   objects   operators   output characters   properties   routines   statements   variables 

The information is held in a single large (300Kb) file because it is very convenient to be able to scroll rapidly up and down the entries. However, this does involve a lengthy download time, so you may wish to save a copy of the file on your own system for local browsing. For this purpose, here is a smaller (45Kb) zipped version.