Fun timing on this plaintext conversation. I built a little browser based plaintext playwriting app this weekend for a little weekend project. Found myself really hating 1. how clunk screenwriting software can be and 2. How unsharable the files are.

With plaintext you can hand the file off to anyone on any device--the caveat being absolutely no one wants to be handed a plaintext script. The software I used ten years ago to write plays is long since deprecated and those files are basically unopenable. Plaintext however remains.

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dunham 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

John August has also talked about using plain text for movie/television screenplays, specifying a format based on markdown and hollywood standard: https://fountain.io/

Sharing aside, I imagine a plain text format would also be helpful for version control.

	▲	spcebar an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Haha, yes, as I was finishing writing the parser, I stumbled upon Fountain and realized my genius idea for a markdown based playwriting format was not so original. Ended up adding some Fountain syntax to my parser and ultimately I built a very functional but not feature complete implementation of Fountain by accident. I built sharing and (sort of) versioning into the web app. Everything is saved in localStorage and on a MySQL server. You can Save or Save As, and every time you Save As it inserts a new database row and gives you a new, sharable URL. I wanted an experience where you didn't have to login to use it, but ultimately, having a way to keep track of all those URLs would actually be a pretty decent versioning system--add diff checking between script versions and you end up with something pretty handy.

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someonebaggy 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

	▲	spcebar an hour ago \| parent [-]
		XML is a good candidate, but actually overkill for the purposes I was looking to achieve. Basically, all I needed was character names are all caps, scene headings have hashes, and stage directions are free text. Put a handful of other niceties like title pages, casts, and page breaks, but never anything so complex it needed additional markup. # INT. JOE'S BEDROOM, DAY. JOE This is my dialogue, yeehaw. JOE exits, and we know JOE is exiting because this is a stage direction, and we know this is a stage direction because it is free text and doesn't satisfy any other formatting requirement.