Plainchant Dev Diary: Paper

A screenplay is not really finished until it is on paper, or on the PDF that stands in for paper. Readers, producers and competitions all expect the same thing: Courier 12 point, the standard margins, numbered pages, and speeches that carry over a page break in the traditional way.

Plainchant can now produce exactly that.

Screenplays Live on a Grid

The hard part of printing a screenplay is not the styling. It is deciding where each page ends. Browsers can split content across pages, but they know nothing about screenplay conventions, and they each do it a little differently.

Fortunately, screenplays are built on a grid. Courier 12 point is exactly ten characters to the inch, and six lines to the inch. So a page is simply 60 characters wide and 54 lines tall on US Letter (58 on A4), and every element sits at a whole number of characters from the margin: dialogue ten in, a character's name twenty-two in, and so on.

That means the app can count lines instead of measuring pixels, the same way professional screenwriting programs do. The page layout is worked out by a small, separate module that never touches the screen, and is tested line by line.

The Rules of the Page

Pagination follows the conventions a script reader expects:

• A scene heading never sits alone at the foot of a page
• A speech that runs over a page ends with (MORE), and carries on under the character's name with (CONT'D)
• A character's name is never left alone at the foot of a page, and a speech only breaks between sentences
• The title page is a page of its own, and the first page of the script carries no number
• Dual dialogue, two characters speaking at once, prints side by side

The First Real PDF

The first version only broke a long paragraph where a sentence happened to end a line. The first real PDF showed why that was not good enough: one page ended with six empty lines, because no line ended in quite the right place.

Pages can now break at any sentence end, and the rest of the paragraph is rewrapped on the next page. That is what a writer would do by hand, and it fills pages the way readers expect.

Printing Without a PDF Library

Plainchant has no dependencies, and adding a PDF-generating library would have broken that rule. Instead, the app draws the pages as real, paper-sized sheets and hands them to the browser's own print window. Choosing Save as PDF there makes the file.

Printing lives in the Export window, alongside the .fountain download, with a choice of US Letter or A4. A seventh button in the toolbar would have crowded it off the edge on smaller screens.

Where the Project Stands

Scripts print as proper screenplay pages, to paper or to PDF, and the output has since been checked both ways on a real printer. The tests have grown to 191 unit tests and 409 checks of the app.

Next: Knowing Your Script

With the pages counted properly, the app can finally answer questions a writer actually asks. How many pages is this? How long will it run? Which scenes are dragging? And how do I get to the third act without scrolling for a minute?