How to remove an unwanted line of text?

georgex5 · Joined: 30 Jan 2008 Posts: 11

I am still struggling with formatting a play script.

An acceptable modified format would be as follows:

AL: Hello.

BOB: Glad to see you.

(INDENT)AL WALKS TO DESK
(INDENT)AND PICKS UP PHONE.

(the direction requires two lines or more.)

I was able to get pretty close to this using and for most of
the formatting and putting the whole text in a table. I then used css to get an indent. But when I do this, I get:

(INDENT)AL WALKS TO DESK
(UNWANTED EMPTY LINE)
(INDENT)AND PICKS UP PHONE.

=====

I am using

Code:
<style type="text/css">
.one{
text-indent:60px;
font-style:normal;
}
.two{
text-indent:40px;
font-style:normal;
}
</style>

AL: Hello. 

BOB: Glad to see you. 

AL walks to deskand picks up the phone 

THE CSS INSERTS AN EXTRA LINE AFTER DESK AS INDICATED ABOVE.
I'd like to get rid of that extra line.

Corey Bryant · Posted: Sat Feb 09, 2008 2:07 pm

I am not certain where "two" is played out because you used one in your HTML source code. But you can try something like

sticks464 · Joined: 31 Dec 2006 Posts: 1283

You can do it as Cory shows or a little simplier using the defaults

georgex5 · Joined: 30 Jan 2008 Posts: 11

Thanks. Both will work but they both require extra html for the direction text, and some directions run many lines. There was a version of the margin html that produced the same result as a word processor with a ruler line, where the ruler identified the direction area. This would be the preferred html if it is possible.

I put the whole script in a table to control the overall width of the
script. This worked ok with the dialog entries but I could not get it
to handle margins for direction.

Regards, George

madprof · Joined: 26 Jan 2008 Posts: 98

This is going to go off topic so forgive me, but... Smile

Not wishing to sound facetious but you're beginning to find out why we use content management systems. Smile

If I was faced with this problem normally and I knew I'd be churning out directions and dialogue lines in great quantity I'd create a tool which allowed me to enter things in quickly and without using any HTML at all, then template it up to do the Right Thing.

This is of no imediate help but really I see no quick fix - you just have to put the stuff in to get the result.

What I'd do if at home - write a text file with no HTML in it. Indent, using tabs, the directions. Then parse it with a little Perl script to put around each line apart from ones starting with a tab which I would put around instead. All paragraphs would have margins made zero by default.
You can write something almost as eaily using PHP I am sure.
If this doesn't help at all, sorry. It's just what I'd do.

francky · Joined: 07 Mar 2008 Posts: 1

Hi,
With a variant to sticks464 you can just use ... for the spoken texts, and <code>...</code> for the directions. With some css-ing of the <code> element you can miss the extra classes in all direction-lines.