Jstar (Joe) with Fountain -- Revisited

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  • Jstar (Joe) with Fountain -- Revisited

    In January I posted the following (truncated) ...

    For those who still like the WordStar keystrokes (all three of us!) I've just discovered a feature in JOE (Joe's Own Editor - https://sourceforge.net/projects/joe-editor/files/ -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe's_Own_Editor ) that allows me to use Jstar (the WordStar emulating flavor of Joe) for writing in the Fountain Markup language. The issue had been that every line ended with a carriage return -- so the text didn't flow into word processors properly. Cleaning up the text was more work than it was worth.

    But in jstarrc (Jstar's configuration file) I found a setting called "flowed" that inserted a space/carriage return combo at the end of word wrapped lines. So this allows me to write in Jstar (with word wrap enabled) and then, by replacing " \n" with a single space, the text flows as if it had never been "wrapped." This is necessary for the Fountain format. (If you use Windows, you'll probably have to download the full version of JOE instead of one of the stand-alone versions -- otherwise you won't have an "rc" configuration file to modify.)

    Once in Fountain format, I can use several websites (or applications) to convert Fountain into PDF or Final Draft .fdx files. Screenplain (http://www.screenplain.com/) is one of the online sites that will convert Fountain formatted text files into HTML (for previewing or ...) or into Final Draft .fdx format. www.afterwriting.com can be used to convert from Fountain to PDF format and downloaded. ...
    While this method will still work (and, for practical purposes it's probably better than what I'm about to write) -- it still bothered me that I had to use a WYSIWYG application to "finish the job."

    I've downloaded and compiled both Screenplain and Barefoot. Screenplain works well for converting directly from Fountain to Final Draft, HTML and PDF. But it refused to convert to formatted text (it kept leaving out the spaces necessary for the screenplay format). I could probably tweak it, but I would have to understand the source and I'm not a programmer.

    At any rate, for those interested in Screenplain, here's its project page ... https://github.com/vilcans/screenplain/

    They still have their online conversions available at ... http://www.screenplain.com/ ... but this site won't convert to PDF (even though that's an added (new) feature in the version you compile). Anyhow, this is about all I'm going to say about Screenplain.

    I'm more interested in Barefoot. Since I'm really not a screenplay writer, I just tinker and post shorts and snippets on Done Deal Pro, being able to save in formatted text and copy to Done Deal Pro's forum is the most important feature for me. And it turns out that Barefoot -- though not perfect -- can work pretty well for this.

    The project page is at .... https://gitlab.com/notklaatu/barefoot

    Once downloaded and compiled, you just type (without the quotes) "barefoot myname.fountain > myname.txt". Barefoot "automatically" saves to the correct format by using the extension. You're supposed to be able to pipe to PDF or directly to the printer, but so far my experiments haven't been that successful doing this. I haven't really tried that hard since Screenplain already does PDF and Final Draft exports.

    Barefoot is not perfect, however. At first it wasn't even close, as all the lines were too long for a screenplay format. I found, however, that I could tweak the code and recompile and -- after a lot of tweaking -- I finally got the settings down to working pretty much how Trelby converts Fountain.

    But there are two issues I haven't been able to fix so far. For some reason, instead of putting one space between paragraphs, Barefoot puts in two. That's a one operation fix in Jstar (Find "\n\n" and replace all with "\n" -- without the quotes.) The other issue a weirder and causes more work. For some reason not all sluglines start at the left, some are put at the Character position. This requires a search for "INT." and "EXT." (and whatever other shot you use) and then removing the space in front of the first words. (In Jstar it's fairly quick, Search for "INT." (as an example), hit ^Q-S (to go the beginning of the line) ^T to delete the first word (or empty space in this case), hit ^L to find the next occurrence and repeat. Do the same for "INT." -- so, altogether, just a couple minutes, but still a pain. The code is available, but it doesn't do me much good since I don't know C, ... and the code labels are written in Esperanto -- so that adds an extra layer of difficulty to tweaking. (First time I've ever actually seen anyone use Esperanto.)

    One other issue -- and those who use FADE IN: to import Fountain files will appreciate this. If I don't put a blank line at the beginning of the file, Barefoot will delete the first slugline. I wonder if FADE IN: uses the same Boost Regex library as Barefoot? At any rate, once done, I've got a well formatted text file that can be copied and pasted into a post at the Done Deal Pro Forum. Oh, and one more step, since Jstar will only let me copy the current page to the clipboard, I have to use less (a UNIX) utility with the "-X" switch for copying and pasting ... as in "less -X myfilename.txt" -- then scroll to the bottom of the file (using the PageDown key for speed), and highlighting from the bottom to the top by scrolling with the mouse. Works well, even though it's kind of odd (I'll be using this process to paste this post from Jstar).

    So the steps for writing with Jstar (in Fountain format) and not using Trelby or one of the online sites for converting to formatted text ...

    1. Write in Fountain format using Jstar
    2. Remove soft carriage returns in text file to make a flowing Fountain file
    3. Use Barefoot to convert the Fountain file into a formatted text file
    4. Clean up the text file
    5. Use less to copy the file to the clipboard and paste into Done Deal
    Last edited by Centos; 05-10-2017, 04:16 PM.
    STANDARD DISCLAIMER: I'm a wannabe, take whatever I write with a huge grain of salt.
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