Episode: 1556
Title: HPR1556: Screenplay Writing On Linux and Chromebooks
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1556/hpr1556.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 05:04:39

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the
Hi, my name is Gordon Syncler, I am known on IRC the odd time I am there as Thistleweb
I am also on Twitter as Thistleweb. This HPR episode should be quick, quick one. It's
going to be on something called screenplay writing. Now for people who know me, I've done
Nano-RIMO the last couple of years, Nano-RIMO is just a regular fiction, it's not screenplays,
but I have decided to try and expand my writing skillset out to screenplays because a screenplay
is essentially a kind of a sort of shorthand version of telling a story, it's a very visual
way of telling a story. There's no superfluous language to describe things, it's very, very
basic, the dialogue is very unadorned, there's no emotion on that, it's traditionally left
to the directors and the actors and the film crew and whatever, so that's where I've
started from, is a way to do that, a way to do a first draft in a screenplay format and
then essentially novelise it to do the proper first draft of a regular story and take
from there. Now what I've been looking at is the format that screenplays are in is very,
very precise, the styles, the formats, the spacing, the layout, the white space, everything
is very, very exact, there's no room for just inventing your own, if you're submitting
a screenplay to a producer or a studio or something, they expect that exact same format,
if you don't have it in that, they won't even touch it, they won't even look at it, so you've
got to basically conform to that format. Unfortunately, that format is a real pain in an editor
that's multi-purpose, like a labour office or a ward or Google Docs or something, because
of the space and all that, it's just a real pain to try and do that, so if you're doing
a screenplay, it really pays to have an application that's specifically designed for that one purpose
and that one purpose alone, that way it takes care of all of the format and for you. Now, I have been
looking at that, obviously the Mac is well served because a lot of the music, sorry, the movie
and the TV industry, they use Macs to write on and produce on, so the Mac is very well
served, I don't know solutions there, but I'm guessing it must be, it has to be. I was interested
on the Linux side. Now, I found two applications actually, one is called Trailbay, and now Trailbay
is a future GP, it's free software anyway, it's Trailbay.org, and I'll put the notes into the
links with both of these in the show notes. It's Trailbay. Now, Trailbay is a little, I think it's
Python, actually, a little Python app, that it's cross platform, there's Windows, there's Mac,
there's Linux, there's an all-debian binary that I used on CrunchBank, and it worked great, it's
absolutely, it's really, really good. It takes care of all the format and for you. You tab your
way through, and it knows, for example, that the stub line at the top should be in all caps,
so you just type, and it's automatically in caps. You hit Enter, and you're down to the description,
it knows that it needs to be left aligned, just regular monotype, it does that, and you're already
in monotype, you enter again, and that's your first characters dialogue, and it's in caps,
you don't have to remember in caps, it's already in caps, and it's center aligned for you,
again, you type your characters name, enter, and it knows the next thing, it's expecting this
dialogue, it's all there for you, it is tab your way through, and it's just so easy,
it has other things like it gives you stats of how many scenes there are, how many
scenes per character, how many words, how many pages, how many characters, you can export a PDF,
you can, it's got a character database, it's got auto completion for characters as well,
so that if you enter a character once, the next time you go to type that character,
that character on again, it automatically picks that up, that's why a little tip of picked up
from watching documentaries on movie production, whatever, that's the main reason why you don't
often get characters that start with the same letter and the same scene, is because it makes
it so much easier for the script writers to switch characters, but this is all the enter
character once and already in there, and auto completes for you, you've got character lookups
for how to spell different characters, and that's like an American name for a female, or it's a
Japanese male name, or whatever it is, so you've got all the character lookups, you've got stats,
export, it's absolutely incredible, it looks like the sort of thing that you could do a complete
script on, and then print it off as a PDF, and it fills in all of the blanks, it fills in your,
it knows the page, the pages at the start that are meant to be summaries, and all that, it does
all of that for you, it is fantastic, it's free of charge, it's also GPL, so that's, it's cross
platforms, I said, so that's Trilby, now one of the things that I have constantly been drawn to is
I like the idea of a Chromebook as a dedicated writing device and nothing else, now I decided I
couldn't get along with Google Docs, a preferred focus writer normally, so I thought I wonder if
apparently Google Docs works better on a Chromebook, it's more integrated than it would be in
a regular laptop, I think that's quite possibly true, so it might be all, but anyway, I thought I
wonder if there's something that's going to be, that's going to do that for screenplays, because Google
Docs is going to be hopeless for that, and alone to hold, there it is, there's a Chrome add-on for the
Chrome web browser, which essentially that's what Chrome is, it's just one web browser, I don't quite
see the point of the add-on app, it's, excuse me, it's essentially just a link to a hosted site,
it's called Rosgript, now all it does is you basically log in, you can create an account,
it's rosgript.com, and again I'll put the link in the show notes, you can either create an account
there, I believe, or you can log in with Google or Yahoo account, I went in with my Google account,
and inside this it's basically like a webmail thing, or it's like a Google Docs sort of a thing,
with all of the same, all the basics that you would need to do a script, it's got the same thing
with encoding notes, it keeps starts on your different scenes, you can presume rearrange it
the order, you can put notes in, you can export it, again it's the same thing when you
like put your stubborn interior kitchen morning whatever enter, and it expects a description,
and it goes through all that same automatic format and for you, it's hosted online on their own site,
which I don't know about any privacy concerns, I'm not actually looked into that, but it is actually
hosted on their site, there's been a couple of reviews in the Chrome app store saying that
they had created data there, and then like four or five days later they went and to log in,
it wasn't there, I don't know, I've only played about it today and it seems fine to me,
the licensing for that is AGPL, apparently according to the developer, the source codes
about our mess, but it works, what's going to be AGPL from now on, should I say, and apparently
Stalman's convinced him, Stalman gets a mention on the source code part of the page,
so presumably that means you'll be able to at some point, maybe even now you're not checked,
go download it and install it on your own cloud somewhere, your own server somewhere,
and that takes care of the privacy concerns, and it'll bits open source as well, so
both of these applications seem to be very, very good at what they do, this is the kind of
unix philosophy of do one thing and do it really well, so obviously if you're looking for something
that can do other things and screenplays, this isn't it, this is only those screenplays, it's all it
does, and both cases, that's all it does, but for screenplays, for what it does, both of them
look absolutely incredible, in the short time I've been playing with them, as I say I'm
I've still, I've just started to add the screenplay thing or to start adding the screenplay thing
to my writing skills, so I've just started exploring these two and at least with Roskrips,
Roskrips.com, I can do screenplays from a Chromebook which is not the kind of news I wanted because
I thought I'd rolled out a Chromebook and it means it's back on off, back on the cards again,
and it's like, it's almost like, like the ring, what almost likes me going the ring,
but anyway that's my problem, so that's it for this short HDR, it's been a while,
hopefully it won't be as long until the next one, thanks for listening, and again,
contact me, you can do email that's Gordon at thisalib.co.uk,
I'm on Twitter most of the time, and at thisalib, I want an IRC, I'm Friday nights usually,
as thisalib, and thanks for listening, and goodbye!
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