[TxMt] Re: New Bundle

[Oliver Taylor]

On Jan 24, 2006, at 10:02 AM, Allen wrote:

> Ah okay -- so basically it's the conversion you want help with?

yes.

> I assume it's because you are not familiar with any programming  
> language (which I must say, your bundle is pretty impressive if you  
> are not -- even if you are, it still is impressive -- do you mind I  
> link to the intro screencast in the RSS feed as an example of  
> behavioral patterns in TM? I can keep a local cache of the bundle  
> if you're concerned about bandwidth).

I'd be glad to host the screencast, if bandwidth becomes a problem,  
I'll let you know. And yes, I know exactly zero about programming  
languages. The first time I used a regexp was for this bundle.

> I would suggest using htmldoc [1] for the HTML -> PDF conversion.

I'll check it out.

> So what you want is to make a regular expression to match each  
> construct in your format, which you already did in the language  
> grammar, and then as the replacement string you specify how it  
> should be transformed. Here you can use $& to refer to the entire  
> match and $1-$n for captures (stuff captured with (…)).

Okay, based on what you posted here before, I added a few things that  
were missing and synced these with the language def.

#!/usr/bin/perl -p

s/&/&/g; #ampersands
s/</</g; #reserved for HTML
s/>/&lgt;/g; #reserved for HTML - maybe this is unnecessary?
s/^EXT\..*$/<h2>$&<\/h2>/; #scene heading
s/^INT\..*$/<h2>$&<\/h2>/; #scene heading
s/^I\/E\..*$/<h2>$&<\/h2>/; #scene heading
s/^[A-Z].*\-\s[A-Z].*/<h2>$&<\/h2>/; #arbitrary scene heading ending  
with a time
s/^[A-Z].*\-\s*$/<h2>$&<\/h2>/; #arbitrary scene heading NOT ending  
with a time
s/^\w.*$/<p>$&<\/p>/; #paragraph
s/\/\/(.*)\/\//<!-- $1 -->/g; #comments
s/\*(.*)\*/<em>$1<\/em>/;	#italics
s/^(\t{4})([^\t].*)$/<dl>$1<dt>$2<\/dt>/; #characters
s/^(\t{3})([^\t].*)$/$1<dd class="parenthetical"> $2 <\/dd>/;  
#parenthetical
s/^(\t{2})([^\t].*)$/$1<dd>$2<\/dd><\/dl>/; #dialogue
s/^(\t{10})([^\t].*:)$/$1<h3>$2<\/h3>/; #transition (right)
s/^[A-Z].*:\s*/<h4>$&<\/h4>/; # transition (left)

The only one that's not working properly is the last one. It's  
baffling to be because it's the same regexp as in the language.

> If you need further help, let me know (as I have no idea what your  
> shell/programming skills are).

I have no programming skills other that those I've already  
demonstrated. Zip

There are a few steps left in the process that need to be addressed.  
Next the HTML marked-up text (as generated by the above script) needs  
to be inserted into an actual HTML document with doctype  
declarations, CSS etc. And somehow (again, I have no idea how) it  
needs to be transfered to a PDF authoring environment (htmldoc or  
whatever).

Lastly, thank all of you. It's great to give something to a community  
and get so much back.