Fountain -- writing a movie script with Tangent?

[peterjosvai]

hi,

pre

I adore Tangent as it is. It is based on a very good concept, and real-life practice, and it is perfect.
I'm not bringing this "idea" up because I have been using Tangent and it looked like a possible good new feature.
Not at all.
I was doing a search in the screen writing software field, and that's what made me realize that Tangent is actually
very close to what so many people seek and want, even in terms of screen writing :)

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Fountain -- the free and cool markdown "system"

Okay (for other readers' sake), Fountain is a very simple markdown "language".
It was created in order to make screen writing possible, again, with ease and for everyone.
In the old past, there used to be typewriters.
That was perfect for everyone, as well as the whole of the movie making industry, including the field of Art too.

Then came the PCs, personal computers with word processors, and then came Final Draft, the Hollywood standard.

A movie script is a simple thing.
You have dialogues, in a narrow column, almost in the middle of the page,
with the character name at the top of it.

You have scene headings that will start with EXT. or INT....
and you have "actions" and "Parenthetical" sections, that is, action descriptions, like "she brings the vacuum cleaner to the room" and additional details that will be part of the scene in the finished film, like "there's heavy snowing outside".

see a script:
https://fountain.io/_downloads/Big-Fish.fountain

and the formatting: https://fountain.io/syntax/

It is basically about paragraphs. A few style of them. And that's it.
Interpreters exist, the Fountain guys have made one, too, to be integrated in any app.

---

the point:

Why would it be great if Tangent spoke Fountain markdown, too?

It is not very easy to find a markdown editor that works with Fountain markings.
Apps exist, it seams. But they are from 2012 or so.
Atom, for example, the text editor "who" was able to handle Fountain, and people love it, ceased to exist :(
It was there in 2022, but died out from the scene in 2023.

There's Emacs and Sublime, and reading the google (duckduckgo) results you'll have the impression that lots of apps and workflows exist. But in reality, no.
There are apps for android :)
And mac.

There is one, from five years ago. thiefmd -- https://github.com/kmwallio/ThiefMD/deployments/github-pages
Thiefmd is really good.

But.. Tangent would be better. Cause Tangent can browse through folders... with previews... WHICH is exactly like working with movie scenes!!! :)
With Tangent, you could write a script using a folder! :)
It could be edited in a modular manner.
It would be amazing.

All that's missing yet is:

1. exporting to PDF and Final Draft format, with the existing software https://github.com/nyousefi/Fountain
   (and there is also a python module: screenplain https://pypi.org/project/screenplain/

2. Importing and using Those few Fountain formatting rules.

To me it looks like Tangent is about 90% ready to do screenwriting.
And when it is ready, it will be the best one.

But all this is really just a loose and passing idea...

[taylorhadden]

This is a pretty cool idea! I think there's nothing technically stopping Tangent from being great at this. The open questions are how to solve it from a design and logistics perspective.

I've reached for the plugin concept before with large systemic additions like this, and I think that's still the right choice here. As a plugin, it would likely touch nearly every system and would thus be a good use case.

Logistically, what this feature set would need is a champion. I don't think I would be a very good one. I don't write screenplays. Ideally, a plugin of this nature would have someone that has picked up the torch to implement it.

[peterjosvai]

You're absolutely right!
It would be stupid to turn a perfect application which everyone can use on a daily basis into something that only .001% of people would use from age 20 till age 27... :) (I'm over that)

What you have created is organic and perfect.
And creating a plugin is by all means the way to go. // For someone who wants that :)

But there is a problem with Fountain... which I only realized last night:
That it is actually NOT a markup "language" (rule-set)

I mean, they offer ways to "force" a paragraph type.. that's markup, sure... using a dot before a new line... to indicate that it is an "action" paragraph...
But this is very .. khm.. rudimentary for even the lightest markup "system"..

Most of the Fountain notation goes without any marking...

A scene heading is what starts with EXT. or INT.
and that's it...
a dialogue is what comes after a scene heading and below a character name... (and no empty line in between)
a character name is a registered name, or is at least all in uppercase...

No markup. Just "regex"...
Not even that... only line-formatting rules .. which the writer has to follow... while s/he is writing the script...
so that a bunch of regex commands could transform the text into a markup format...

My idea now:

The next time I'll mention this will be when I have put up a tiny markup "rule-set"...
with which all that simple formatting can be handled simply.

I have actually done that, back in 2012, using a WYSWYG rich text / html editor), writing online, saving to a mysql database...
It was an avant-garde style screenplay, for myself, and it worked beautifully...
This whole idea came up now because I accidentally found that old database-table in a database where I wasn't looking for it :) and the script parts... and I was (I am) happy that it's not lost...
and I decided that I'll use it in the future too...
But before that, I made a search, cause I didn't want to invent the wheel... or use a workflow than which better ones exist...

But once again:
Writing a movie script needs a "folder concept"...
and the note concept is also very good for screenwriting..
and Tangent knows that... and it is tempting :)

Anyway, have a nice day!! :)

[taylorhadden]

I think Fountain totally qualifies as a markup system. Just because the markup is triggered by reserved words doesn't mean it's not markup!

The screenplay format in general is designed to be typed on a typewriter with essentially no formatting while still conveying semantic meaning. You could argue it's one of the first plain-text markup conventions!