Screenwriting with Fountain-Mode and Olivetti-Mode is PERFECTION!

Long time programmer but only ever utilized VIM for majority of my career. After pivoting careers I wanted to keep up with my radical open source mentality and always wanted to try Emacs. I discovered Fountain-Mode and paired that with a command line application called Afterwriting for turning my scripts into PDF's. I've never felt so powerful!

Ooh, glad you enjoy emacs, Btw, Out of curiosity, did you go with EVIL mode, or just standard emacs bindings?

I'm sticking with standard bindings atm... I want to move on to EVIL mode I do. I just thought it would be better if I got use to the vanilla emacs before I started breaking things. It was about a month of that before I decided to look at just customizing my stuff without adding packages. So currently Fountain-mode and Olivetti are actually my only extra packages I think.

Never heard of Fountain-mode. I use Olivetti as well so I’ll check it out.

Err... there's at least two occurrences of 'thier' instead of 'their' in your screenplay. Time to refer you to the Flyspell package?

Aye coming in with the grammer clutch. Thank you lol... I'll have you know I reread these scenes to make sure there was no one like you in the comments but here we are.

The whole thing looks very nice, though TMO icons are slightly out of theme. Another thing I would try in this setup is a font of the Serif family.

I'll have to see what I can do. I've been sticking with vanilla everything for a little while and so this is my first step at customizing things for my use. Org-Mode is something I'll be exploring here very soon. TMO icons are the like ubuntu style stuff up top right? Are there any icon packs you'd recommend?

Qogir is really nice

Oh, that is pretty good approach, I personally went first with doom emacs, to see what and what not, but with easier start, But now I have my own init.el :D I gotta also say, its damn impressive how well evil works. It is about the best vim emulation I have ever used, so in the end, imo it is getting best of both worlds Tho, one suggestion i can give, is, to remap caps-lock to control, to have overall less.. strain on pinky finger Btw, a bit off topic, but if you ever need help with emacs/configuring, I suggest watching System Crafters and his discord server, there is really many helpful people there that helped me aswell :D (Sorry, I am just not sure what is your proficiency in regards to emacs configuring Dx, so sorry if it came off as rude)

> TMO icons are the like ubuntu style stuff up top right? Are there any icon packs you'd recommend? I see, sorry, can't recommend anything, I just turn the toolbar off :)

Not rude, I'll have to check it out. I'm VERY proficient with systems engineering and low level programming. ELISP and stuff is just something new and I'm having fun taking time. I do see it meme'd quite a bit that people spend all their time configuring emacs rather than using and so I'm trying to not be a stereotype lol and actually use it for something.

Eventually I'll get there I'm very into clean, no button layouts as well. I've kept it just for learning and getting that muscle memory built up. They've helped me along tho I will say that much.

I think menus contain much more information and take less screen space

Oh I see what you mean. I turned off the toolbar now I guess, the benefit was when I was exploring the eww stuff it kinda worked like a traditional browser.

I see

Lisp certainly is interesting, and.. unusual.. in terms of syntax, but once you get past initial lisp shock, parentheses are very comfy :D And right, since elisp is full language essentialy, yeah, can do about anything (Anything, as in anything other high level langs can do) with emacs. I even saw raytracer written in elisp lol And taking time is best :D

>Another thing I would try in this setup is a font of the Serif family. And that would be sacrilege.

The way I see it, a P-51 Mustang gets about 1000 hours of maintenance for every hour of racing... This is sort of the same thing, right?

As long as you're getting your words down and your can fix typos later, maybe it's good to just leave them and fix later?

That's what editors are for!

Flyspell is the distraction-laden way to do spell-checking. I vastly the prefer the older distraction-free way to do it: ispell. It does it's job when you summon it and stays the hell out of your way until you do! And if you want to check just one word, because your brain won't let you focus unless you're sure, there's ispell-word.

Agreed

I have never heard about fountain mode, and it looks fantastic. I cannot imagine improving my English skills to the point where I'd be tempted to write a script. I still would love to try other things. Has anyone heard of different tools to help you write English prose? There's languagetool, lsp-grammarly, numerous dictionary, and thesaurus packages for Emacs. But I imagine there exist so many different tools outside of Emacs. Tools that could help you write better. Which ones do you think would be great to have integrated with Emacs?

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hell yeah! avy's integration with ispell out of the box is one of my favourite emacs things

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Is this really how real-life movie scripts look in the modern day?

Maybe /u/Foo-jin is applying for the job... I always wondered if editors get work that way. "I found 45 errors in your brochure, hire me and I'll show you where they are."

Yes. Just do some quick googling, this Or worse… I’m not saying I’m a professional writer yet. I’m actually a 600s Camera Assistant meaning I work on the technical side and camera team. Specifically I’m the one that builds the camera rigs and I’m The one that slated each scene the guy yelling “36 Alpha, take 2, MARK!, Clap”. You’d be surprised on what some of The scripts I’ve read that were getting made. It’s often how passionate is the filmmaker and who do they know. You’d do another step in the editing and printing stage, you add water marks, page numbers, breakdown the script (Fountain mode actually has commenting as well which is beautiful) and stuff like that. I’m of school of thought is my words are meaningless until I have an actor saying them and you can change my dialog I don’t care it’s the story I’m trying to tell that matters.

This is also just my first draft of a feature I’m writing. Mainly what you want to write as if it’s happening now so no past tense, be a descriptive as possible so if you can’t SEE it , it’s not there. So yea

This is really great, thanks for sharing. I added some functions to write split lines in dialog, and now it's pretty much perfect for me. I can post the code if anyone's interested, not sure how well it fits with the screenwriting spec, though. I would have thought this would use a latex export or similar. It's quite strange to have to install a special nodejs package to export to pdf.

Oh I agree about the Nodejs part! I’m super interested in your addition! Also, I’m in awe that you just modded it so quickly that’s amazing one day!

Never heard about Olivetti-mode, so that's cool.

It was a fun waste of time. I would have liked to do it with tab completion, but didn't want to overwrite the `fountain-dwim` function, so this literally just inserts a bunch of spaces. (defun fountain-line-indented-p () "Returns T if the line at point begins with whitespace, otherwise return NIL." (save-excursion (beginning-of-line) (char-equal ?\s (char-after (point))))) (defun fountain-find-last-dialogue () "Return the last line of previous dialogue as a string." (unless (bobp) (save-excursion (previous-line) (if (fountain-match-dialog) (buffer-substring (line-beginning-position) (line-end-position)) ;; If not on a dialogue line, keep searching (fountain-find-last-dialogue))))) (defun fountain-insert-indent () "Insert an indent at point using spaces to carry on from the last line of dialogue." (let ((indentp (fountain-line-indented-p))) (save-excursion (beginning-of-line) (delete-horizontal-space) (unless indentp ; was the line indented before deleting space (cl-loop repeat (1+ (length (fountain-find-last-dialogue))) do (insert ?\s)))))) (defun fountain-just-one-space-or-indent () "If inside a dialogue, call `fountain-insert-indent', otherwise call `just-one-space' as normal." (interactive) (if (fountain-match-dialog) (fountain-insert-indent) (just-one-space))) (define-key fountain-mode-map (kbd "M-SPC") #'fountain-just-one-space-or-indent) So now you can write JULIET Romeo! ROMEO My nyas? JULIET What o'clock tomorrow? Using `M-SPC`. But because the mode itself indents after you start typing, it doesn't properly indent an empty line, so I write the lines and then indent. If anyone has a better way of doing this I'm all ears.

Oh I forgot, this is just for viewing in emacs. If you want it on export, wrap the inserted spaces in square brackets like `[[ ]]`, and you'll need to set `print_notes` to `true` in afterwriting.

Everything I do in Emacs, including prose writing, is in CM Typewritter (with New Athena if I'm doing non-Latin). Monotype faces seem to me just a lot easier to spot spelling issues with, and I can use whatever fonts I want when I export to PDF or feed the file into XeTeX.

do you mean "CMU Typewriter Text"?

It's pretty standard in screenwriting to use monospaced fonts dude

So? There are plenty of fonts that are both monospaced and have serifs.

Yes! Just YES! Been on the same wagon for a long while, but left it for FadeIn after I had issues with exporting my projects. I miss it though. Loved the ability to apply org-mode too, split-window and then keep my overview in one window (show bible, character-sheet etc) and the body of the script unfolded in the other. Oh, and being able to browse for research in a third buffer. Never leaving the workflow or getting distracted. hm. I just realised that I'm praising a text editors for being great at... editing text...

No, not exactly. I did once since plugin development in vscode and it was absolutely horrible. For even the simplest thing you need to read hours of very unprecise docs and edit stuff in multiple locations. Implement some design patterns and think about inheritance and polymorphism. And asynchronous events and callbacks. Even if you want just change some colors. Or try to change a short key. Super hard the popular IDEs. It's a total mess. I heard the same about Intellij. Not so emacs. One task is done by one function call. Impossible in current bloated OOP methodology. In other words every emacs user is a plugin developer, that's how you can see it. You are one thousand times more productive. That's the power of lisp, it's the best tool to liquidate boilerplate code. Now do the maths: you've got a tool where you can do everything with one function call. And people are adding stuff for 40 years. And not noobs or idiots. Mostly real hackers add for 40 years more and more functionality. Emacs is an absolute killer of the current IDEs. The fact that it's not that popular is only because of ignorance and good marketing. It's ridiculous that once you add to emacs a color scheme that resembles visual code it gets a thousand times more downloads Comparing emacs to visual studio code is like comparing the latest Aston Martin to a 15 year old Volkswagen Golf.

> Flyspell is the distraction-laden way to do spell-checking. I never thought of things that way, thanks! > ispell. It does it's job when you summon it and stays the hell out of your way until you do! For me it would stay out of my way permanently because I would forget to ever summon it, lol. I suppose I could run ispell on save maybe, but I think right now the squiggles don't bother me much.

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I was mostly joking, but thank you for the in-depth answer! I'm not a developer, and a noob to emacs, and I love reading stories like this. Thanks.

Did I tell something about proportional fonts?

And i love writing stories like this :) Although i prefer a style with more references to psychedelics and Superman(the house of El from krypton and similar). You are welcome!

I do use the unicode versions, now that you mention it. I used the plain CM ones for years.

Programmer AND camera guy?

Yuh, there’s dozens of us dozens. Lol remember James Cameron had to create the software first before making Avatar. There’s actually a very strong technical side in the film business. Firmware modding, on fly breakdowns and soldering it just makes me a Swiss Army knife that gets me hired more! And it was easier out of college to get a programming and IT job than start in the film biz.

It’s almost like I’m not delivering a .txt file if You read the fountain-mode documentation it’s basically just markup for scripts you then take this and send it to final draft or whatever program your going to use to edit it. Every producer I know uses final draft and you can directly import the .txt or .fountain as a “script” …. Dude.

I’m also a programmer I’m not going to change the font because it matches any fucking paradigm. Remember my radical open source mentality? I’m the guy on set who’s taking notes and trying to make sure little jimmy in Peru has the ability to get close to what we do here in Hollywood… and guess what? If the story is good enough nobody cares. Elitism is what I’m so not about. I fucking hate Arri, nobody should be forced to spend 70k on a camera, nobody should be forced to use predatory distribution companies, nobody should be forced to sell their baby to Netflix, Disney, A24, Timewarner or whatever to be able to say you made a movie. I’m specifically against forcing anybody to do anything in anyway. Fucking Fury Road didn’t even have a screenplay!

I’ll share my full script with you if you want in PDF mode, I’m just using an offline version a program called Afterwriting. I can do water marks, scene and page numbers, full title page, I could include notes as well for script breakdowns. It’s pretty sweet!!

You are right, I corrected my comment! It's called 'Afterwriting'

uhm... Interesting, how does it pay compared to 9-5 mid sized company tech jobs?

I can pull 15 to 20k a month if I have my computer as a DIT/ data management station. Include my camera cart my expendables, if it’s out of town my perdium, and if I operate or do any focus pulling I re-rate. Because I double as the DIT I have the ability to stay an extra 2 or 3 hours. I’ll pull almost 80 hours a week for a month or my longest gig was five weeks. Union benefits. Im serious… not pulling any bodies leg. My previous job was at HP as a systems engineer for their microcontrollers that go into there printers… I made barely 50 a year without benefits (contractor). Here in ABQ Facebook also opened a data center I worked on and I made like 30k that year so meh. And I get to do what I love now, nothing is the same, and im like the most technical person. My way out of this young man’s game tho is im starting to make wires on demand like if anything breaks I hop to my little trailer I pull on my truck and make a quick to spec cable and charge extra.

Lol you can look back at my 8 years of reddit and see me go from IT to a wannabe filmmaker and then to a full fledged professional. Ignore the stoner stuff haha I'm actually not as much into that world anymore.

That'd be really cool! Thanks! Might draw me back to GNU Emacs for writing again!

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Forgive my ignorance, but which one?

Count me among the dozens! Though I am at the start of my career in docs :) Wish I could set aside a year to develop my emacs config but I've gotta get it configured little by little while working out the kinks. Curious what other config quirks you have ? If you're interested I'd love to have a chat