Any other screenwriters?

[Chris Angelico]

On Sat, Mar 9, 2013 at 8:07 AM, Rick Dooling <rpdooling at gmail.com> wrote:
> To that end, I would like to take this Ruby script (which works pretty well, but throws errors in Mac OS X; some Ruby ones and some Prince ones) and convert it to Python so I can fix it myself, because I don't know Ruby at all, and would rather work in Python.
>
> https://github.com/olivertaylor/Textplay

Hmm. You're looking at a fairly detailed markup language, and a
potentially buggy third-party implementation of it. Are you able to go
from the https://github.com/nyousefi/Fountain code instead? Given that
you don't know Ruby at all, you'd be no worse off there, and it seems
to be the "reference implementation".

Porting either version to Python is going to be a big job,
unfortunately. However, given that the reference implementation seems
to have been written for a Mac, you have a reasonable chance of being
able to execute the code, run the tests, and play with it, while you
develop your own version. That's a *huge* help in porting - you can
implement piece by piece, comparing in detail both the code and the
output of each subsection.

Alternatively, can you get the xcode version to run directly? (I'm not
a Mac person and have no idea whether this is at all possible.) Can
you call on it, in some way, and thus write just a wrapper around the
outside? Might be a smaller job.

Ultimately, you're working with a markup format. That means it's all
text in, fiddle fiddle, text out... a workflow that Python's pretty
good at handling. But you may be letting yourself in for a fairly big
job :)

ChrisA