#What are Mad Libs?
Mad Libs are short little stories made to be altered slightly to produce
often hilarious writings.

In the prehistoric past, when all this was done with chisels and stone
tablets, one person would write a story of perhaps a few paragraphs.  The
story could be anything from a rescue adventure to a description of what
firemen do when putting out a burning building.

However, with Mad Libs, the author selected certain words or phrases that
would be replaced by the listener, who of course did not know what the
story was about or what words he was replacing.  If the author had a
phrase in his story such as "2 flying buzzards", he might wish to ask the
listener to supply him with a number and an adjective.  Thus the phrase
might be transformed into "564 orange buzzards."
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Hopefully, when you acquired this program, you also obtained a few sample
stories with which to learn how a Mad Lib works.  Once you have gone
through a couple stories, you will most certainly get the feel for what
is going on.

After you understand the workings, you may write your own Mad Libs and
try them on friends.  Unlike prehistoric times, when tablets were
eventually worn through with erasing and recarving, you may use these
Mad Libs over and over again.
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#Setting The Mad Lib Program Defaults
It you have a monochrome screen, Mad Lib will automatically use the bold
and underscore attributes to highlight different types of text.

If, however, you have a color screen, you may select the colors you wish
to be used for the windows, regular text, data, and messages for each of
the introductory screen, data entry screen, and story viewing screen.
You simply have to enter the numbers corresponding to the colors in the
setup screen.
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#Running A Mad Lib Story
To run a story, you need to specify two things about it.  Its name and
where it is located.

Its location is the DOS path used to find it.  For example, if your
story is on a disk in drive B: under subdirectory \STORIES then the
location would simply be B:\STORIES.  If the story is on the same disk
and under the same subdirectory as the program, then you don't have to
specify a location.

The name is simply the DOS file name of the story.  When you enter the
name, do not enter any extension.  Mad Lib will assume an extension of
'.MAD' and will automatically place that on the end of the file name.
For example, if the story is NEWSTORY.MAD, all you should enter is
NEWSTORY for the name.  Conversely, the extension '.MAD' must be on
every story file.
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Once Mad Lib has located the file, it will read the file and proceed to
ask you to supply the necessary words to be used in the story.  To
avoid complications, you should not enter any words or phrases longer
than 30 characters in length.

After you have entered all the words needed by the story, you simply
have to page through its viewing.
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#Creating A Mad Lib Story
A Mad Lib story can be created by any program that will produce ASCII
files.  This could be a word processor, a text editor, or even the DOS
EDLIN program.

The story, of course, must follow a definite format, though.  The first
line in the story will be taken to be the title.  It can be anything,
but should not be longer than 60 characters.

Everything after that will be considered as part of the story.

At various places in the story, you will specify words or phrases to be
entered by the user.  In the following paragraph, the user will be
prompted to enter four different types of words or phrases:
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After Robert found the <adjective> statue, the earthquake began.  It
measured <number> on the Richter scale.  He became very scared.  Being
the adventurer he was, though, the <liquid> started moving through his
veins and he went into action.  Just as he was about the get out of the
cave, the statue said, "<exclaimation>!"

In this example, the user would be asked to enter an adjective, a number,
a liquid, and an exclaimation.  When the story was viewed, the words
entered by the user would replace the words or phrases in between the
< and the >.
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Since the text editor built into Mad Lib is as of yet quite small,
certain provisions had to be made using return characters.  To allow for
large and small replacements, Mad Lib will adjust the words on each line
to make the best use of space.  This means that not all carraige returns
will be followed.

To insure that a carraige return takes place at a point you wish, use two
carraige returns.  The rule to follow is that if there are two or more
consecutive cairrage returns, all but one will be printed in the viewing.
For example, to get two blank lines between two paragraphs, you must put
three blank lines between them when you are creating the story.
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#Thank You
We appreciate your taking the time to use and review our program.  We
would like to develop expanded versions of this program, but would also
like the support of its users.

If you would like the latest version of the program plus a hardcopy of
its source code, send $16.00 and one 5.25" diskette to the address in
the introductory screen.

Thank you once again and we hope you enjoy our program.