The TADS 2 Author’s Manual

Version 2.5.5b.
Copyright © 1987 - 2002 by Michael J. Roberts.

Welcome!

Welcome to the HTML version of the Text Adventure Development System (TADS) 2 documentation.

Please read the copyright and licence file for important information concerning the copyright of this documentation and the absence of any warranty.

You’ll probably want to download these pages to your local machine if you find yourself using them a lot. There’s a complete zip archive here. Note that the manual now uses cascading style sheets (CSS) for formatting. If you don’t like the way this displays on your computer simply delete the file named tads.css and the manual should look as it always did.

Note that this manual covers only TADS 2 - it does not cover any of T3, the next generation TADS environment.

NOTE ALSO THAT THIS IS A BETA OF THE REVISED VERSION 2.5.5B MANUAL. PLEASE EMAIL ME WITH ANY PROBLEMS.

TADS Overview Documentation

• TADS Overview Documentation - an introduction to TADS
  

TADS 2 Author’s Manual, Version 2.5.5a

• Copyright and Licence

• Preface: Introduction
  
• Chapter One: Sample Game
  
• Chapter Two: About Object-Oriented Programming
  
• Chapter Three: Introduction to the Language
  
• Chapter Four: Parsing Fundamentals
  
• Chapter Five: Advanced Parsing Techniques
  
• Chapter Six: The Parsing Sequence
  
• Chapter Seven: Parser Summary and Quick Reference
  
• Chapter Eight: Language Reference
  
• Chapter Nine: Designing your First Game
  
• Chapter Ten: Advanced Techniques
  
• Chapter Eleven: Introduction to Multimedia TADS
  
• Chapter Twelve: Multimedia TADS Fundamentals

• Appendix A: Standard Adventure Definitions
  
• Appendix B: The Interpreter (Run-Time System)
  
• Appendix C: The Compiler
  
• Appendix D: The Debugger
  
• Appendix E: Errors
  
• Appendix F: External Functions
  
• Appendix G: Multimedia Games with a Text-only Interpreter
  
• Appendix H: Multimedia TADS Deviations from HTML Standards
  
• Appendix I: Multimedia TADS Character Entities
• Appendix J: HTML tags and attributes supported by multimedia TADS
• Appendix K: Character Set Mapping and Translation

• Index. (not up to date)