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About Screenplain

You're a hacker. The command line is your home. You know tools like grep, sed and Git inside out. You have formed a symbiotic relationship with your text editor. Those tools are powerful in the right hands. But you're also a screenwriter. Screenwriting is much like programming. It's about structure and form, and -- obviously -- about reading, writing and modifying huge amounts of text. You don't want to use software that lacks the power of your hacking tools just because you're writing a screenplay instead of a shell script.

Enter Screenplain.

Screenplain allows you to write a screenplay as a plain text file using a format called Fountain. Text files are simple and supported by all text manipulation software. It's not just for hackers, too. The simplicity of plain text allows you to easily view and edit them on devices such as tablets and phones. No need for specific screenwriting software.

The magic that Screenplain performs is to take your plain text file and convert it to a good looking screenplay in an industry standard format. Send that file off to your producer, agent, director or screenwriting competition. The supported output formats are FDX HTML, and PDF.

Screenplain can be used as a command-line application or a library. An Online version of Screenplain is also available.

Note that Screenplain is under development and is missing features and the master branch may not always work. I'm currently working on supporting the whole Fountain specification. (Fountain was previously known as "Screenplay Markdown" or "SPMD.")

Installing

pip install screenplain

To enable PDF output, install with the PDF extra (installs ReportLab):

pip install 'screenplain[PDF]'

Credits

Screenplain was coded by Martin Vilcans.

The CSS code that formats Screenplain's HTML output as something that looks as much as a printed screenplay as is possible in HTML was created by Jonathan Poritsky.

The Fountain file format is the result of a collaboration between Stu Maschwitz and John August.

License

Screenplain is released under the MIT license.

Developing

Set up virtual environment:

python3 -m venv .venv
. .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
pip install -e .

After this, the screenplain command will use the working copy of your code.

To run unit tests and style checks, run:

bin/test