Re: Collapsible outline

[jr_fox@xxxxxxxxxx]

fenda@xxxxxx wrote:

> My needs are very simple. In our case, the purpose of that feature is
> for movie scriptwriting. It's very useful to have a structured vision of
> the story, i.e., the possibility of switching the viewing of the script
> in progress to the headings of every scene, hiding the rest of the text
> (narrative, dialogues and so on). Then I would need only the possibility
> of hiding body text and to see only headings during the flow of writing
> (two levels and without special formatting needs beyond standard XyWrite
> possibilities). Further more, it would be very useful to have a third
> "collapsible" area for notes, technical comments and so on. It could be
> the third level in our "collapsible" outline. Then I could "collapse"
> the third level (notes) or the second level (script scenes) or both (to
> see only the headings) at my ease. I hope this explanation is clear
> enough.
>
> I have tested several suggestions but the only really viable procedure
> for my purposes is the Norman Bauman one: "I start every section with a
> boldfaced or underlined headline, so I wrote a macro to copy every
> boldfaced or underlined line to a separate file."
>

This may or may not address your requirements -- I don't know -- but there
was a dedicated package for scriptwriting called WALK. It was created in
XPL: all you needed to supply was your own EDITOR.EXE. I believe the author
was Ernest Wallengren, a screenwriter and Story Editor / Associate Producer
on several TV series. The idea was to be able to appropriately format and
paginate as you wrote (with XY), while probably making unnecessary an
after-the-fact package like SCRIPTOR for "B" pages etc. or repaginations,
plus it had a set of related utilities that had some production-related
significance which I just don't recall at this point. Whether any of that
would be useful to you, or if it has any applicability to the *earlier*
script process you apparently have in mind, I couldn't say. WALK probably
dates back to the III+ era, but it may work with circa XY-4 Editors. Mr.
Wallengren made his XPL package freely available to anyone who asked for it,
back in the day, so I don't think that should be an issue. I'm sure I have
a Zip archive of it around somewhere.


Jordan