eprovst
commented
4 years ago This is something I have been thinking on for a while actually. There are mainly two reasons why this kind of flexibility is not something I am planning to add, at least entirely:
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Wrap is intended to be very simple and straightforward tool. The problem that this creates is that every feature should be carefully selected as not to introduce feature creep. The
-voption of cat is a great example of something to avoid. -
I want to make it easy for users to export industry standard screenplays and hard to shoot oneself in the foot. Underlining of scene headers for instance is a great example, this goes against typographical best practices and is not seen in any style guide.
Emboldening scene headers without double spacing seems to be a recent trend however so that is something that might be added. That way there are two options: traditional (the default) and contemporary which can even change between versions of Wrap to reflect current usage. However emboldening with double spacing is again something that isn't done by most professionals and thus shouldn't be an option of Wrap in my opinion.
Stopping dialogue from breaking across pages is something that would require an entire rewrite of the PDF export module and that would break "one minute per page" estimates. So it's unlikely this will be added either.
Support for A4 is indeed something that is missing, shouldn't be too hard to add, only needs some margin offsets.
In summary: Wrap tries to complement Afterwriting by being simple and straightforward to install, use and get standard compliant results. So there is no goal of having the same or similar flexibility :slightly_smiling_face:
Putting limits at the functionality of submodules also helps to make other parts a lot more flexible. Supporting languages different from English, multiple output formats...
It's a careful balancing act, combined with limited development time. Of course if you disagree with any of my concerns or are able to provide patches, please do. I'm open to changing my mind and it's Free and Open Source Software after all! :slightly_smiling_face:
Which reminds me to leave some code quality disclaimers in some modules. The parser is fairly ugly for instance...
rnkn
corvore
sten0
First, in case I’ve not mentioned it, I really appreciate you building Wrap and putting your time/energy into the Fountain ecosystem. Thank you.
Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Not really, except perhaps not being able to specify page size.
Describe the solution you'd like
There are slight variations in how people may like to format their scripts; generally I’d say these are limited to: page size (a4 vs. US letter), whether dialogue breaks across pages, and whether scene headings are double-spaced, bold, and/or underlined. I’d like to be able to configure these via command line switches. There are probably others variations people wish for (e.g. #29 ) but I’d say these are the main ones.
Describe alternatives you've considered
Currently I use afterwriting, but I think multiple implementations are a very positive thing.
Additional context
I maintain an Emacs mode for Fountain editing. Currently it has internal export functionality, but I would prefer to remove this in favour of external CLI tools such as Wrap. Being able to specify export formatting via command switches makes for a pretty seamless user interaction, e.g. here’s a screenshot of how a user configures different export profiles in Emacs: