Screencoding Part 1.5

Screenwriting with textmate 2.0

This is pretty freaking sweet. After growing tired of Final Draft's frustrations, Oliver Taylor spent a year learning CSS and XHTML to develop a bundle* for TextMate (an OS X text editor). Essentially, it writes out screenplay as a plaintext document with a bunch of invented xhtml tags. The real genius is that the bundle leverages TextMate's feature set to effectively mimic most of the automatic formatting of Final Draft. You can create 'character shortcuts', there's auto-completion of slug lines, automatic indenting etc. All the stuff you want with screenplay software. It can also import/export Final Draft files, and export HTML, XML, PDF, etc.

This is a great example of lateral thinking. Programming languages, e.g. Python, are highly structurally rigid. Modern Text Editors are designed to deal with myriad structured languages and do 'on-the-fly' processing and display of said language. Leveraging such a program to deal with another form of structured language (screenplays) is just genius. Its screencoding!

Some real cool things:

a) TextMate costs USD$40. How much for Final Draft 7 again? TextMate is a *super* powerful text editor because its designed for coders. Features like folding and regular-expression search could be useful. Its also got a highly active an involved developer. (c.f. Final Draft)

b) Part of that power is TM's extensibility. You can easily add your own custom functions to this bundle (including FD's command-1, command-2 element switches), and share the love. There's also no reason why in the longer termy many of the deeper features in FD couldn't be replicated e.g. stats regeneration, character pages, advanced pagination** Even simple things like changing the colour of particular elements should be pretty easy... Don't like having Character names in pink? Change it!

b) The document is plaintext tagged as XHTML. If people are smart, there could be momentum to adopt Oliver's tags as *the* standard for openscreenwriting formatting.... For the scribopherian's out there, this means there could be an easy way to post your script excerpts to your blog. A standard way. Wouldn't that be neat?

c) If it is adopted as the open standard for screenplays, it also means you could get other developers replicating the functionality of this bundle across multiple applications on multiple platforms... all writing the same format.

d) This also means it could tie into other open source production applications for scheduling, script break downs etc.

e) This creates competition and competition breeds innovation. I think part of the reason that FD and MMS have stagnated is that there just isn't any competition.... and there's no room for commercial competition in such a niche market. This could be a case of the longtail biting back.

Caveat: I haven't actually tried the bundle but I am excited by the idea of what it can do... and thus encourage anyone who is remotely impressed to blog about this... momentum is a very very very very power force for change.

[ impressed ]

v1.1 of this document. Tidied up.

* Essentially, its a collection of 'bits' glued together to make TextMate optimised for a particular development environment. Bundles exist for Ruby, Python, C++, CSHH, etc. They give you short cuts, proper colourisation, formatting etc. appropriate to whatever code you're working in.

** I suspect this will be the greatest weakness with this approach. TextEditors are not particularly well known for their page layout control. Mastering your margins may prove a problem... currently. Its a solveable problem and if there's enough momentum,