Stylesheets - Re: screenplays - it's my subject line and I'll mess with it if I wanna !

Author

Re: screenplays - it's my subject line and I'll mess with it if I wanna !

David J Patrick

2004-06-22, 12:16 pm

On Tue, 22 Jun 2004 02:41:57 -0700, Wolfgang Wildeblood wrote:
>
> For the screen stylesheet you work in character widths, which as we
> have now established are 3/5em. The result will be the line breaks in
> the same place on screen as they are when printed.[
[snip] Do your margin in inches for print, then count how many
> characters across the page that results in. For screen use "padding"
> not "margin" or "text-indent", and set in ems. The result will be the
> same layout on screen as the printed page.
>
>
>
> /* That should have said 36em for my example */
>
[snip] Read my other post,
> and quit messing with the subject line will ya?

whaaa?? messin' ? I'm helping differentiate what would otherwise be a sea
of similarity ..
.... you're serious, aren't you ...

> Forget about numbering. Page break is useful but not
> reliable.

but number of pages (and hence numbering) is the carrot for the
scriptwriter, and an essential reference for reviewers.

> Hmm.
Ahhhhh !

Tim

2004-06-24, 12:16 pm

Wolfgang Wildeblood wrote:

David J Patrick <davidjpatrick@sympatico.ca> posted:
[color=darkred]
> but number of pages (and hence numbering) is the carrot for the
> scriptwriter, and an essential reference for reviewers.

They're really left with two options - print it and estimate, or do a word
count and some maths. The latter is probably going to be far more useful,
and can be done on a computer really easily.

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David J Patrick

2004-06-25, 11:15 pm

On Thu, 24 Jun 2004 22:40:00 +0930, Tim wrote:
>
> They're really left with two options - print it and estimate, or do a word
> count and some maths. The latter is probably going to be far more useful,
> and can be done on a computer really easily.

wc would have to calculate on a per element basis and also take into
account different element line spacing. It could be done, I suppose, but
if page breaks were effected for printout, why couldn't they be for a
screen representation?

Tim

2004-06-26, 12:20 pm

On Thu, 24 Jun 2004 22:40:00 +0930, Tim wrote:

David J Patrick <davidjpatrick@sympatico.ca> posted:
[color=darkred]
> wc would have to calculate on a per element basis and also take into
> account different element line spacing. It could be done, I suppose, but
> if page breaks were effected for printout, why couldn't they be for a
> screen representation?

Because the screen isn't a piece of paper. It's somewhat rare for an
on-screen display to be a printed page size (in content). I did forget
something obvious - many print previews do give you a page count.

But counting pages is quite a vague estimation of what a script entails;
notes, lines, descriptions, etc., all have different amounts of work to go
along with the number of words involved.

Text processors often do quite a bit of statistical analysis on documents,
giving word counts, sentence counts, and so on. That sort of thing would
be just as good a way of doing an estimate, probably even better - I'd say
a word count is far more useful than a page count (I work in television
production, and I'd be loathe to estimate the length of a production by the
page count; it's just to arbitrary).

--
If you insist on e-mailing me, use the reply-to address (it's real but
temporary). But please reply to the group, like you're supposed to.

This message was sent without a virus, please delete some files yourself.

Neal

2004-06-26, 7:15 pm

On Sat, 26 Jun 2004 21:59:03 +0930, Tim <tim@mail.localhost.invalid> wrote:

> But counting pages is quite a vague estimation of what a script entails;
> notes, lines, descriptions, etc., all have different amounts of work to
> go
> along with the number of words involved.

It is vague, but it also happens to be the convention in the acting world.
There are too many parameters, some of which you cannot analyze from the
text alone - tempo, pauses, etc. - so they assume 1 page = 1 minute, and
it tends to work more often than not.

So for this type of project, that is the unit of measurement that needs to
be worked out. I suppose a script could count displayed characters and
carriage-return situations in some way to measure where page breaks should
occur, but it's beyond me to explain how.