memnus: A stylized galaxy image, with the quote "Eternity lies ahead of us - and behind. Have you drunk your fill?" (Default)
Brian ([personal profile] memnus) wrote2003-12-23 02:30 pm

Home, day whichever

They're all the same anyway....

Saw Robin off to the airport, promptly came home and slept until 1. Cousins are around... I don't know if it's my imagination, but it feels like the Jordans as a whole seem to be treating much more coldly than they have in the past. Maybe I'm just projecting my own self-imposed isolation onto them.

Started typing up a new script for Rocky, then realized that typing it up in MS Word would suck, a lot. So I'm now in the process of downloading MikTeX onto this laptop. Granted, it can only take the small distribution, and I'm exceedingly new to TeX, so I have a request:

I'd like to build a 'script' template. The script would be divided into scenes, maybe automatically numbered, each one with a heading and small description. Things that don't fit into the scene structure well could be labelled interlueds instead, also perhaps numbered.
A scene would be composed of three sorts of pieces: lines, stage directions, and songs. A line has the name in the narrow left column, and the text on the right - should be easy enough to do. A stage direction is italicized, in parentheses, and centered on the page. A song is in two columns, one for the lead and the other for backups, with the names of the singers at the top of the columns and the whole thing in all caps. Optimally, the song title is also displayed at the top.
The whole thing is also in full-page 8.5x11 format so I don't have to use more pages than I have to.

If you're all too lazy to send me tips for this, can I at least get a copy of the infamous homework template, so I can maybe reverse engineer it?

You all are cool people and don't forget.

Happy belated Solstice, by the way, for any of that persuasion.

click

[identity profile] avani.livejournal.com 2003-12-23 05:14 pm (UTC)(link)
http://www.ai.mit.edu/lab/sysadmin/latex/documentation/help/Catalogue/brief.html

Here are some toys / template styles. There is a drama one there that you may be able to adapt. These are TeX styles, so they're going to be chintzy and ugly as sin, but they usually work.

[identity profile] iluvsheep.livejournal.com 2003-12-23 06:01 pm (UTC)(link)
The more I find out about LaTeX the more I realize that 90% of LaTeX is cheap hacks. In that vein, I offer the following solutions to your queries.

With regard the the numbered scenes, I would use the following tag "\section{insert scene title here}". This will automatically number the scenes and will give them the title that you put in. For interludes, you might simply want to use "\section*{insert interlude title here}". All the asterik does is tell latex not to number that particular section so that it doesn't throw off your scene numbering. I am not entirely sure how to get seperate numbering for interludes if that is what your heart is really set on. You would need to talk to someone 1337 like Vrable or Erika for that. (Or it might just be really simple and I don't know about it. Who knows?)

The best way that I know of to have columns is to use a table and just put the stuff in the table and let latex figure out the spacing for you. An LJ comment is not nearly enough space to try to explain LaTeX style tables, so I will let you look them up online. However, if you want a few samples, let me know.

As for the centered and italicized stage directions, I am not entirely sure what you mean by "centered". Everything in LaTeX is by default "justified" to it evenly goes from one side of the page to the other. You might try "\begin{center} insert lots of stuff to be centered \end{center}". I am not entirely sure what that will do for something that is already spanning the width of the page though. As for italics, there are two options: "\emph{stuff to be italicized}" and "{\itshape stuff to be italicized}". Sometimes one works, sometimes they both work. I don't really understand it.

As for the using the whole sheet of paper, there is a really spiffy module that someone wrote for that. Just type "\usepackage{fullpage}". If that doesn't work its because either you don't have the package or because latex is looking in the wrong place for it. If you experience these sorts of problems let me know and I will see what I can do from afar.

Anyway, I think that's about it. This is turning into somewhat of a tome but I know how hard it is to learn latex. It has quite a learning curve over MS Word, but I think that once you figure out all its little foilbles it is better for quite a few things.