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Fountain Support #166

Open atoav opened 6 years ago

atoav commented 6 years ago

Fountain (extension: .fountain) is a plaintext markup language for screenplays. You can think of it as a "markdown for screenplays".

It wouldn't need much functionality, most importantly syntax highlighting, proper styling and exporting (most important pdf) and scene recognition (important for the left pane to navigate). If there was an option to list characters and some statistics I wouldn't mind tho.

atoav commented 6 years ago

Note there is also a MIT licensed javascript parser for Fountain called Fountain.js

kinomysli commented 6 years ago

+1 for .fountain support

ChrisUnterberg commented 5 years ago

also +1 for this. As there is no 'real' distraction free screenwriting app right now, this would be awesome.

If you think a plugin would be powerful enough to do all the things needed (aka replacement / format / output / ect.) let me know, so I could try to have a shot at it.

kinomysli commented 5 years ago

Hello Chris,

Oh, yes I think the plugin for .fountain support would be very valuable. I would like to read more about your idea about replacement. Do you think about tools for replacing most common words like for instance names of HEROES by abreviation or is it something completely different?

Below I'm noting few upgrades for WM3 which I think could made a software more friendly to screenwriters:

  1. Stucture: Only because of this single feature of being able to collapse a whole scene to single line (like in example below) the WM3 for me is a true gem in writing software > ## INT. CAR - DAY > ## EXT. HOUSE - DAY > ## INT. GRIM CORRIDOR - NIGHT

(>) collapsing/expanding icon

Now It think for screen-writing It'd be great if INT. EXT. could be = ## to make above simple > INT. CAR - DAY > EXT. HOUSE - DAY > INT. GRIM CORRIDOR - NIGHT

Why not #? I usually omit # - level one - at the beginning of work. I don't like a scene to be level one. The reason is that in the future i may need to add some master structure (like ACTS, PLOTS or similar). I may delete it at the end (because of industry standard), but for writing being able to build a master structure is (obviously) a valuable asset.

  1. b) Above but with an option for localisation/customisation A setup option for setting up a #, ## as a different chain of letters. This way some users could set up "INT." to be equal to # (maybe they would like SCENE to be a level one ), and for instance me, writing texts exclusively in Polish language - I could set up WNĘTRZE. (INTERIOR in Polish) as ## (level 2 - because I'd like to add some master structure in future)

  2. Tabs for dialogs Nothing fancy. It would be great if:

Action description

NAME dialog

That is a string "NAME(new line)dialog" Would be automatically changed to:

Action description [tab] NAME [tab] dialog

Of course tab is only a tab-length space. Not a true tab character.

  1. a) (Don't know if it is possible) Smaller space for enter/new line.

To be honest I'm not extremely in love with .fountain. Why? Because it wastes a lot of space. I have to use a new line character after every dialog line and actions description, the length of a scene grows, and thus portion of a scene I can see at the same time narrows. Because of this I'm first writing a scene in, lets say, half .fountain format, omitting most of new line characters (example below). Only when I'm happy with a scene I'm correcting a format to exactly match .fountain - example 3b.

Example (half .fountain format)

INT. CAR - DAY Scene action description HERO line HERO2 line Action description

  1. b) The same scene in full .fountain:

INT. CAR - DAY

Scene action description

HERO line

HERO 2 line

Action description

As you can see above format is much harder to control. It would be great if new line character spaces would be radically smaller (but still existing to match .fountain format)

4. Below I'm noting a sort of ideal format for me (I'm aware of subjectivity :)). Let's imagine that between each line is a small new line character.

INT. CAR - DAY // INT. = ## Scene description // tiny new line between and after "Scene description" HERO // let say that I could just write a "h1" to automatically change to "HERO" dialog // tab-length space is added when HERO(new line)dialog scheme is recognized HERO 2 // like above - I could set up 'h2" to automatically change to "HERO" dialog line Action description

  1. Preview/Print Self-evident :)

Ok, Chris. For my purposes, changes above, would be more than enough. I hope some of my ideas will be valuable for you. Thanks for your outstanding work. The WM3 even at beta stage is a blast!

Take care,

Kamil Sarnowski

On Mon, Dec 24, 2018 at 4:41 PM ChrisUnterberg notifications@github.com wrote:

also +1 for this. As there is no 'real' distraction free screenwriting app right now, this would be awesome.

If you think a plugin would be powerful enough to do all the things needed (aka replacement / format / output / ect.) let me know, so I could try to have a shot at it.

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ChrisUnterberg commented 5 years ago

Hey Kamil, please note, that I am none of the writemonkey devs, I am not sure if that was clear from my post. Your ideas seem like a valid starting point, it might even be easier to add these things before adding the complete .fountain spec with all its features.

To add to this, context sensitive formatting would be great (like trelby - Write Sceneheading, press enter, automatically write action, press tab, write a characters name, press enter, write dialogoue, ect.

The plugin-api is not yet released it seems. I will try to write a plugin once there is an api and documentation and the devs are ok with this.