stylesheet for screenplays - @page example ?

[David J Patrick]

Re: screenplays - it's my subject line and I'll mess with it if I wanna !

On Thu, 24 Jun 2004 22:40:00 +0930, Tim wrote:[color=blue]
>
> They're really left with two options - print it and estimate, or do a word
> count and some maths. The latter is probably going to be far more useful,
> and can be done on a computer really easily.[/color]

wc would have to calculate on a per element basis and also take into
account different element line spacing. It could be done, I suppose, but
if page breaks were effected for printout, why couldn't they be for a
screen representation?

[Wolfgang Wildeblood]

It's my party and I'll cry if I want to (was: screenplays - it's my subject line and I'll mess with it if I wanna !)

David J Patrick <davidjpatrick@ sympatico.ca> wrote:
[color=blue]
> On Thu, 24 Jun 2004 22:40:00 +0930, Tim wrote:[color=green]
> >
> > They're really left with two options - print it and estimate, or do a word
> > count and some maths. The latter is probably going to be far more useful,
> > and can be done on a computer really easily.[/color]
>
> wc would have to calculate on a per element basis and also take into
> account different element line spacing. It could be done, I suppose, but
> if page breaks were effected for printout, why couldn't they be for a
> screen representation?[/color]

Because... (as I've already said... Grr) when page break properties
are implemented on screen, it's called "projection " and it's only
implemented in Opera. Have you tried it out yet?

Anyway, what's wrong with looking at the print preview when you want
to see the page breaks? Come to that, I'm not really sure why you want
markup at all; if the proper formatting is your over-riding concern
plain text files are the go.

--
You would cry too, if it happened to you.

[Tim]

Re: screenplays - it's my subject line and I'll mess with it if I wanna !

On Thu, 24 Jun 2004 22:40:00 +0930, Tim wrote:
[color=blue][color=green]
>> They're really left with two options - print it and estimate, or do a word
>> count and some maths. The latter is probably going to be far more useful,
>> and can be done on a computer really easily.[/color][/color]

David J Patrick <davidjpatrick@ sympatico.ca> posted:
[color=blue]
> wc would have to calculate on a per element basis and also take into
> account different element line spacing. It could be done, I suppose, but
> if page breaks were effected for printout, why couldn't they be for a
> screen representation?[/color]

Because the screen isn't a piece of paper. It's somewhat rare for an
on-screen display to be a printed page size (in content). I did forget
something obvious - many print previews do give you a page count.

But counting pages is quite a vague estimation of what a script entails;
notes, lines, descriptions, etc., all have different amounts of work to go
along with the number of words involved.

Text processors often do quite a bit of statistical analysis on documents,
giving word counts, sentence counts, and so on. That sort of thing would
be just as good a way of doing an estimate, probably even better - I'd say
a word count is far more useful than a page count (I work in television
production, and I'd be loathe to estimate the length of a production by the
page count; it's just to arbitrary).

--
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[Neal]

Re: screenplays - it's my subject line and I'll mess with it if I wanna !

On Sat, 26 Jun 2004 21:59:03 +0930, Tim <tim@mail.local host.invalid> wrote:
[color=blue]
> But counting pages is quite a vague estimation of what a script entails;
> notes, lines, descriptions, etc., all have different amounts of work to
> go
> along with the number of words involved.[/color]

It is vague, but it also happens to be the convention in the acting world.
There are too many parameters, some of which you cannot analyze from the
text alone - tempo, pauses, etc. - so they assume 1 page = 1 minute, and
it tends to work more often than not.

So for this type of project, that is the unit of measurement that needs to
be worked out. I suppose a script could count displayed characters and
carriage-return situations in some way to measure where page breaks should
occur, but it's beyond me to explain how.