Script Macros
I've taken a few whacks at macros for your script and I've made some
progress. I managed to create a "De-Scenify" script that strips the scene
numbers and restores the margins on the scene title lines to the same
margins as the body text. I've also got a script that does a fair job of
picking out scene titles. The details, of course, are the killers.
Technical problems arise from ID'ing scene titles by their traits. They
have two: They're all caps and they start at the left indent. Flagging a
section of text as all caps is easy enough. Unfortunately Prowrite lacks
any facitlity for determining the position of insert point nor do any
positioning commands guarantee the insert point will be at the beginning of
the line. Also 'Move to end of paragraph' or '..line' would be useful to
mark the whole title since 'Move to end of sentence' considers dashes ("-")
to be a sentence end.
Computers oughta work to accomodate us, not the other way 'round but
ProWrite's ARexx set isn't quite robust enough yet (or I'm not clever
enough 🙂 ). So…how do you feel about putting some "flag" character at
the beginning of your scene titles? Say, a tilde ("~") or any character
you think you won't otherwise use. This will give us another trait to ID
scene titles.
Alternatively you could guarantee no other phrase that qualifies as a
complete Prowrite sentence will be in all caps. This affects things like
"FADE OUT" and "CUT TO." Or we can create an exceptions table containing a
vocabulary of directions so things like "FADE OUT" will be excepted. Now
we're getting complicated, though.
What do you think? — Art