Unexpected delay when showing any passage

Question

Hi,

I'm playing with Twine for a week now, because we're preparing a simple adventure for others. Due our lack of experience, tight deadline and lack of coding skills , we've chosen Harlow 2.1

Currently I have one 'dedicated' header passage, with tag 'header', it currently contains only:

<h3>(print: (passage: )'s name)</h3>

Header works without problem, it displays current passage name. But I am witnessing unexpected delay before the passage is shown. It looks like the header is displayed/updated, then there is 1-3s delay, then the passage text is rendered. It works the same even on stupid simple passages which contains only static link to other passage. And the delay is noticeable both in online editor and in exported html file.

Have I missed something? Is it supposed to create "interactive-like" feeling of listing through the book? Or maybe, is there some project-specific configuration, where I can disable it? Or is it specific to Harlow when using 'header' passage? I've tried to google it, but to no avail.

Thanks for any feedback

J.

ps: sry for repost on Reddit, I missed this forum  

Answer 1

As a result of how Harlowe has implemented it's Passage Transition process all HTML elements that are block based (like your h3 element) are ignored by the process's visual effect (fade-in). This is why the h3 element appears instantly where as any non-block based content that follows it (*) will fade-in.

To get around this behaviour you will need to use CSS like the following in your Story Stylesheet area to convert any block based HTML elements you're planing to use over to an inline-block based one.

h3 {
	display: inline-block;
	min-width: 100%;
}

(*) That 'following' content can be within the same Passage, within a Passage that is included via the (display:) macro, or in the case where the block based element is in a header the 'current' Passage.

Comments

great, that explains a lot. There were other weird delays in some passages, but I see some <p> in place :)

I'll ask about better way how to write conditionally displayed lines without breaking formatting in other question ..

thanks!