Lyrics Syntax

[Hendrik Noeller]

Hello Everyone,

I’m currently talking to a user trying to fix an issue with lyrics formatting, and I stumbled upon a strange anomaly:

I use the official fountain parser from https://github.com/nyousefi/Fountain, and when I write the following lines, both of them are interpreted as lyrics:

~These are lyrics

These are lyrics too

Using e.g. afterwriting.com or according to the user I’m in contact with Slugline (which I can’t test since I do not own a license) only the first line is interpreted as lyrics. The documentation on fountain.io does not mention anything about this behavior.

Is there an agreed upon behavior for this?

I personally prefer the way the official parser does it, as it allows this:

~First paragraph

still first paragraph

~Second paragraph

still second paragraph

Which is using a tilde to mark a new paragraph/section of lyrics.

Hendrik

[Stu Maschwitz]

Slugline requires a Tilde on each line in order for it to be interpreted as Lyrics. The Lyrics section of the syntax guide doesn't get too explicit here, but it does show an example in which a Tilde is placed on each line that wants to be shows as lyrics.

-Stu

--

[clint]

I think it's simpler to focus on "phrases" instead of line breaks.  A phrase is easier to talk about in the context of Fountain rules.  The reason is that a line of a fountain file isn't actually a line of a script, for any of the alternate meanings of "line".

My question then, is what are you trying to achieve with the line breaks in your phrases?

It seems like if you're writing one phrase that's all lyrics, you shouldn't be also burdened with deciding where the line breaks go.  That's the formatter's job.  That's what the host application is supposed to be doing *for* you.

Perhaps you're trying to manually indicate meter or cadence?  It seems consistent that if you're manually overriding the formatter, then you should also manually indicate phrase types.  If you're unlucky or digging deep enough, you can see this philosophical approach in other places in fountain, where manual overrides generally require extra work and attention.

None of this is to say that we shouldn't be handling this the same way across our applications.  Compliance however, is rather tricky for fountain, because a benchmark between applications is only possible if we include pagination rules, which we've sorta been trying to avoid.  Probably gonna have to happen eventually, I'm just not ready to take that plunge yet.

The technical reason (separate from the philosophical approach), is that it makes it possible to alternate between singing and speaking for a single character.  If you, uhmmm, "infect"(?) nearby lines with lyrics, then you'd need some other notation or rule to manually undo that.  Maybe that rule would be something like "a 2-space (blank-printing) line above and below can break application of the lyrics rules", but that's far more complicated than something like "Lyrics begin with ~".

-Clint

On Tuesday, February 28, 2017 at 10:26:29 AM UTC-8, Hendrik Noeller wrote: