[TxMt] Re: New Bundle

[Allan Odgaard]

On 24/1/2006, at 10:08, Oliver Taylor wrote:

> [...] I've posted a new screencast that goes into much more detail  
> regarding what I the bundle to be able to do. Grab it here: http:// 
> www.ollieman.net/files/screencast2.mp4

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

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).

But as for the conversion -- you seem to have defined a very simple  
format for the screenplays which can be converted to HTML simply by  
doing line-by-line substitutions.

Perl (for example) can do a substitution (replacement) with this  
command:

  s/«regular expression»/«replacement»/«options»

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 (…)).

Normally you would loop over each line, and do a transformation to  
test for each type of construct, but perl has a -p option which  
basically does that for you, so we can settle with the substitutions.

Looking at your example file (but not the language grammar) I arrived  
with the script and substitutions shown below (it may look a little  
complex, though mostly because of the escaping of slashes):

#!/usr/bin/perl -p

s/&/&/g;
s/</</g;
s/\/\/(.*)\/\//<!--$1-->/g;
s/^[A-Z].*:$/<h4>$&<\/h4>/;
s/^EXT\. .*$/<h2>$&<\/h2>/;
s/^\w.*$/<p>$&<\/p>/;
s/^(\t{4})([^\t].*)$/<dl>$1<dt>$2<\/dt>/;
s/^(\t{3})([^\t].*)$/$1<dd class="parenthetical">$2<\/dd>/;
s/^(\t{2})([^\t].*)$/$1<dd>$2<\/dd><\/dl>/;
s/^(\t{10})([^\t].*:)$/$1<h3>$2<\/h3>/;

You can either save this script and run it with a file as stdin and  
have it output the result to stdout, or you can paste it directly  
into the bundle editor (as a new command) and set input to selection  
or document, and output to e.g. replace selection, like shown here:

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Actually, after taking the grab, I added two lines to the script to  
escape & and < (since these are reserved HTML characters).

> The ultimate goal is to end up with a PDF which contains text that  
> conforms to the Studio Format [...]

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

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


[1]: http://www.htmldoc.org/