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adding details to readme for contributing
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pieartsy committed Dec 3, 2024
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# TADS 3 Cookbook
Tasty TADS 3 recipes for solving common and uncommon problems when writing interactive fiction.
# TADS 3 website
A website in progress created by [pieartsy](https://github.com/pieartsy) to try and aggregate TADS 3 resources (and at least add a search bar)! Uses Jekyll as a static site generator.

There are two aspects of the TADS 3 Cookbook:
# Contributing
Right now I am looking for help with these three things in order of priority.
1. Aggregating existing resources
2. Adding search bars to the peripluses
3. Updating the peripluses

* A [wiki](https://github.com/jimbonator/tads-cookbook/wiki) of recipes, with one problem and solution per page
* A [repository](https://github.com/jimbonator/tads-cookbook) of code examples that may be compiled, played, and experimented with
## To aggregate existing resources
My preference is that you open an issue using the Resource contribution template and fill out the information according to the `.yaml` structure of the [`resources.yaml` file](./_data/resources.yaml). *You **can** add more than one resource at a time!*
```yaml
- title:
author:
description:
url:
```
The wiki and code samples are intended to be brief, and not full-fledged tutorials of the TADS language or library.
If you want to go the extra mile, you can make a fork and add directly to the `resources.yaml` file yourself, then make a pull request from there.

## More information
If that's too much work, please do just send me the resources you want to include (with links). PR a text dump, send me a gist, whatever. You can even contact me @pieartsy on the [intfiction.org forums](https://intfiction.org) with whatever you have.

* [TADS](https://www.tads.org/) - TADS is a free authoring system for writing your own interactive fiction
* [TADS 3 Bookshelf](https://www.tads.org/t3doc/doc/index.htm) - Quick starts, tutorials, technical manuals
* [adv3](https://jimbonator.github.io/tads-cookbook/adv3/index.html) and [adv3Lite](https://jimbonator.github.io/tads-cookbook/adv3Lite/) periplus - library reference organized by categories and subject matter
* [TADS at The Interactive Fiction Community Forum](https://intfiction.org/c/authoring/tads/20)
## Adding search bars to the peripluses and tutorials
The tutorials and manuals that exist right now do not have search bars. Neither do the peripluses. Adding some functionality in this respect would go a long, *long* way into making TADS 3 more accessible.

Ideally, all of this HTML would be searchable using the slick method of [lunr.js and Jekyll](https://www.stephanmiller.com/static-site-search/). However, Jekyll doesn't process the HTML of static files without [Jekyll Front Matter](https://jekyllrb.com/docs/front-matter/), which means that this method doesn't work on most of the documentation, not until it's converted into something Jekyll can look at.

I tried to put front matter into all the static files using [Front Matter defaults](https://jekyllrb.com/docs/configuration/front-matter-defaults/) so that Jekyll would look at them, but it didn't really work. As well, putting front matter on some pages manually (such as the peripluses) just breaks them, because they're using HTML 4 (or older) elements, not HTML 5. If anyone wants to help noodle out how to navigate this with me, please do.

Alternatively we'll turn to bare JavaScript search bars...

## Updating the peripluses
The peripluses are generated from the source code comments and existing documentation for Adv3 and adv3Lite.

Currently the adv3Lite periplus is referencing version 1.5, and adv3Lite is, as of Dec 2024, on version 2.1.1. The adv3Lite periplus on this site should use the newest version. (I'm not sure if this is possible, but what if we eventually got it to a state where it directly references the adv3Lite repository's most recent releases as Eric Eve updates it...?)

As well, the Adv3 periplus links directly to the original TADS website documentation, which means the documents are not fulltext searchable--and since Michael Roberts has been MIA for years, it's unknown whether they will remain up and hosted for the foreseeable future. They are fully archived on IFArchive right now, and with the current license they cannot be modified, but I would like to host them on this site as well.

This would hopefully lead to the slick lunr.js option being viable again, but who knows?

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