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DubScript b24 Introduces Partial "Fountain" Markup Support

So for those of you who haven't heard, John August 'n friends introduced the world to an extended version of his "Scrippets" markup language for WordPress. The markup rules, designed to let you write a screenplay with any text editor, is called Fountain, as in the shortcut street in LA (though I prefer 6th street).

I took a look at the syntax for this markup, and though there seemed to be some ambiguities about preferred behavior in places, I decided to give it a go anyway. The result is a usable-though-incomplete implementation. The supported features are as follows:

DETAILS

  • Scene Headings (including forced via starting line with ".", but not Scene Numbers)
  • Action (tabs and spaces, as with all DubScript formatting, are NOT preserved however.)
  • Character - (can be forced as action with two spaces afterwards)
  • Dialogue - (and single linebreaks are preserved.)
  • Parentheticals - should work.
  • Dual-Dialogue (Works. With parentheticals, etc.)
  • Transitions (including forcing with ">" -- (so long as you don't end with "<")
  • Centered text (works. See above)
  • Emphasis/Italics/underline Seems to work okay. (may or may not show up depending on selected font, some of which don't support italics or bolding. Oh, and escaping asterisks with backslashes doesn't work.)
  • Title Pages are unsupported, though displayed as text. DubScript still hasn't figured out a good way to implement Title Pages, so this is going to wait until it can be made uniform.
  • Page Breaks are indicated with a horizontal line
  • Line breaks-- breaks should be respected, but numerous sequential line breaks may be displayed as a single one. I should probably test this a bit more, but there you have it.
  • Leading tabs/returns - In breaking with the standard, leading tabs and returns are NOT (yet?) preserved.
  • Notes -- not displayed, but are basically ignored
  • Boneyard - ie, commenting out sections of the script -- should work. the /* and */ wrapped around text should effectively make them "disappear"
  • Sections/Synopsis- are simply ignored. No support here.

With a typical "Fountain" script, I'd guess 90% or more is going to look right. The sample I used looks 100% to my eyes, but possibly doesn't use every single feature. So give it a download, and tell me what you think!

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Fountain Resources

Fountain is an easier way of writing screenplays that lets you use any simple text editor.

  • Official Fountain Web Site
  • Fountain Syntax
  • Courier Prime (free screenwriting font)
(note- JA is a cool guy, but not affiliated with DubScript)

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