Version 0.7, Treaty of Babel Revision 12

This is the source code for babel, the Treaty of Babel analysis tool. Babel performs all the fundamental operations for dealing with the features offered by the treaty, and serves as a flexible multi-tool for analyzing and working with treaty-compliant files.

Namely, babel:

• extracts metadata from story files
• extracts cover art from story files
• determines the format of a story file
• determines the IFID of a story file
• verifies the correctness of iFiction metadata
• bundles story files, metadata, and cover art together in the blorb format

Babel is also a portable C API for accessing the functionality provided by the treaty.

Included with the babel source is a suite of programs intended to extend babel's functionality and help users start taking advantage of the benefits provided by the treaty.

The babel suite includes:

• babel-get: Fetches metadata and cover art from a variety of sources
• babel-list: Demo program to describe all story files in a directory
• ifiction-aggregate: Combine multiple iFiction files into one
• ifiction-xtract: Search metadata for a named value
• babel-cache.pl: Build a cache of metadata and cover art for your story file collection
• babel-marry.pl: Encapsulate your story collection with its metadata
• simple-marry: Simplified babel-marry for windows users
• babel-wed.pl: Find and merge a story file with its metadata (also available as windows executable)

Parts of babel are intended for use in other programs. When adapting babel's source, the files babel.c, babel_story_functions.c and babel_ifiction_functions.c will probably not prove useful. However, you may wish to use babel_handler, which provides a framework for loading a story file, selecting the proper treaty modules, and seamlessly handling blorb-wrapped files.

Building Babel

To build babel:

1. compile all the source files in this directory
2. link them together
3. the end

For folks who find makefiles more useful than generalizations, there is a makefile provided for babel. The makefile is currently configured for Borland's 32-bit C compiler. Comment out those lines and uncomment the block which follows for gcc.

To compile babel-get, first compile babel, then do the same thing in the babel-get directory.

To compile ifiction-aggregate, ifiction-xtract, babel-list, and simple-marry, first compile babel, then compile the relevant C file in the extras/ directory (These may rely on #include files from the babel directory, so, for example, to compile ifiction-aggregate, gcc -c -I.. ifiction-aggregate.c), then link the object file to the babel and ifiction libraries (babel.lib and ifiction.lib under Windows, babel.a and ifiction.a most everywhere else. eg. gcc -o ifiction-aggregate ifiction-aggregate.o ../babel.a ../ifiction.a)

Contributing to Babel

Babel is intended to accept contributions in the form of treaty modules as defined by the Treaty of Babel Appendix.

These modules should use the declarations made in treaty.h. The file treaty_builder.h generates a generic framework which simplifies the task of writing treaty modules. Its use is not required for treaty compliance, but it should prove useful.

Attribution

Most of this code is (c) 2006-2010 by L. Ross Raszewski

The following files are public domain:

• zcode.c
• glulx.c
• executable.c
• level9.c
• magscrolls.c
• agt.c
• hugo.c
• advsys.c
• misc.c
• alan.c
• adrift.c
• html.c
• treaty.h
• treaty_builder.h

The following files are Copyright (C) 1999, 2000, 2002 Aladdin Enterprises:

• md5.c
• md5.h

And are used in accordance with their licenses.

The following files are Copyright 2006 by Emily Short:

• test/bronze/Bronze.zblorb

All other files are (c) 2006 by L. Ross Raszewski and are released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ or send a letter to

Creative Commons,
PO Box 1866,
Mountain View, CA 94042, USA.