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# Grotesque #
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# Version 0.9.1 (8/2011) #
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# http://grotesque.sourceforge.net #
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0.9.1 Release Notes
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* .blb import has been disabled due to a critical bug
* Fixed a bug in which progress dialogs (library loading, story importing, etc) would not disappear after the process was finished
* Added experimental Windows support
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* About *
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Grotesque is a program for organizing and exploring your interactive fiction library.
Grotesque is copyright 2009, 2010 Per Liedman and 2011 Brandon Invergo.
See the file COPYING for licensing information.
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* Requirements *
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Python 2 (>= 2.5) (Python 3 is currently not supported)
GTK: For GTK2, pygtk is required (any reasonably current version should be fine)
For GTK3, pygobject is required (the newer, the better)
Currently, two separate versions exist, one for GTK2 and one for GTK3. It is not sane to try to maintain a single Python application that supports both. If you are not sure which version of GTK you are using, choose the GTK2 version of the program. However, be advised that the GTK2 version will not be supported past Grotesque version 1.0. However, with most major Linux distributions moving to GTK3 this year, this probably won't be a problem.
The Windows version includes all the necessary files to run it. For that reason, it's 8mb and contains a lot of files. I'll work on paring this down if possible. To run it, just run grotesque.exe.
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* Installation *
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In a terminal, simply type:
$ python setup.py install
Note that you may need root priveledges to install. If you wish to install it yourself manually, you may instead type:
$ python setup.py build
Then copy the contents of the src directory to somewhere in your PYTHON_PATH. The file grotesque may be used to launch the application.
For installing it in your desktop environment (ie Gnome), there is an application icon in the directory src/grotesque/data.
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* How to use Grotesque *
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Grotesque is an interactive fiction library manager. This, of course, means that you need some interactive fiction to get started. Hop over to http://ifdb.tads.org to find some good ones. You'll also need some interpreters to read the interactive fiction files, as Grotesque does not handle that directly. For Linux, Gargoyle (http://ccxvii.net/gargoyle/) can handle most formats.
Use of Grotesque is pretty straight-forward. If this is your first time running it, it will walk you through setting up your preferred interpreters. Once you're in the program you can import stories into your library by clicking on the folder icon (recursively import a directory) or on the '+' icon (import file(s) from a directory).
Grotesque will attempt to extract metadata from the story files, however in the event that it fails, it will retrieve the information from IFDB. Likewise, the program can also retrieve cover art from IFDB. This feature can be turned off in the preferences.
If you have used a previous version of Grotesque, your library may need updating, which the program will do the first time you run the new version. Since this version stores more metadata for each story than previous versions, it will also optionally fetch more data from IFDB. This process may take some time with larger libraries so please be patient!
You can filter your library by such things as author or publishing date using the filter list on the left. In the main library list, you can sort according to any of the columns. If you start typing, you can search for a particular title (you may need to click somewhere on the list first). If you right click on the column headers (in GTK3) or on the list itself (in GTK2), you'll find a pop-up menu which allows you to show/hide columns. Double-clicking a story, hitting enter while it's selected, or hitting the play button while it's selected will launch a story. It will change from being in bold text to having a normal weight to indicate that you've tried this story (handy for big libraries or for junkies who download stories faster than they can complete them). Right-clicking on the list itself (both GTK2 and GTK3) will allow you to toggle the played state of a game directly.
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* Bugs & Feature Requests *
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Grotesque is currently beta software. While it can probably be considered close to "feature-complete", it's may still be a few bugs short of a 1.0. If you happen to encounter one or if you have a great idea of how to improve the application, please visit http://sourceforge.net/projects/grotesque/ and either leave a bug report or drop a note in the forum, and we'll see what we can do. For bug reports, please include as much of the fololwing information as you can:
-> Operating system & version
-> Python version
-> Grotesque version (gtk2 or gtk3)
-> GTK version installed on your system
-> pygtk or pygobject version
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* Development *
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If you would like to help out with development, you're more than welcome! Please contact me in that case.
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* Contact *
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Brandon Invergo <b.invergo@gmail.com>
