(i should have thought to make the "lists" rule #10,
in honor of david letterman and his "top 10 lists".
and then i could have made this "specials" rule #7
instead, because 7 is a special number. oh well...) :+)
10a.
plays. the lines of the characters in a play will be formatted distinctively if the character's name (a) starts a paragraph and is followed by (b) a colon and then a tab, and then their dialog.
there can be no spaces or tabs in the character's name; you must replace them with underbars or some other filler.
a character must have a (to-be-decided) minimal number of lines before they are given any distinctive treatment.
the nature of the distinctive treatment is up to the reader.
10b.
"narrator" indication. the lines of a "narrator"
will be given distinctive treatment if formatted as described.
a narrator's dialog is often not indicated with a name per se;
to get this effect, just start such paragraphs with a colon.
10c.
f.a.q., or question-and-answer sections.
format a question-and-answer sequence in the same way
as described for a play (i.e., as if the "question" lines were
uttered by one character, and the "answer" lines by another)
and they too will each be formatted distinctively.
10d.
definition lists. for definition lists, treat the
terms and their definitions as if they were two characters
in a play, and format them in the manner described above.
10e.
folder-exposition. you can create an e-book
that automatically consists of all of the files in a folder,
arranged alphabetically by name, with a one-line text-file
that says "folder-exposition". note that such an e-book
will be a dynamic entity on the end-user's machine, in that
any files they add to the folder become part of the e-book.
10f.
"tours". the zml-viewer keeps the "history" of the pages that you visit during your session in a listbox, which you can summon and use to return to any of the pages.
you can also save the list of pages in the history listbox as a plain-text file, and that file can subsequently be loaded into the zml-viewer again, to be followed in that session.
(as a plain-text file, this "tour" file can be edited easily,
in case your traversal wasn't exactly as you wanted it;
in general, you should only delete lines from the file,
though, since adding incorrect entries causes problems.)
10g.
special sections particular to books.
there are some types of sections that are common to books.
if you use a header-line for a section from the list below,
the zml-viewer will format that section "appropriately".
(in some cases, this means centering the text horizontally,
and positioning it in the upper-third of the page vertically.)
~tab~title (so special it doesn't even need any blank lines)
~tab~frontispiece
~tab~dedication
~tab~a note from the author
~tab~acknowledgement
~tab~acknowledgements
~tab~forward
~tab~foreword
~tab~prolog
~tab~prologue
~tab~preface
~tab~author's note
~tab~epilog
~tab~epilogue
~tab~appendix
~tab~appendices
~tab~notes
~tab~footnotes
~tab~endnotes
~tab~metadata
the items in the following list can actually head an otherwise-empty section, which will be filled automatically by the zml-viewer. for instance, if you use "contents" as the header of an empty section, the zml-viewer creates a table of contents to put there.
table of contents
contents
table of figures
figures
table of illustrations
illustrations
table of links
links
references