Telugu in Rawscripts

[Ritchie Wilson]

A writer and developer asked if it would be possible to use Rawscripts to write screenplays in Telugu. You is a great implimentation of a normal text editor for that language here: http://lekhini.org/. Plus the JS it uses is released under the GPLv2 -- a perfectly suitable licence for Rawscripts.

There is, though, some major work needed to add Telugu, or any similar language. That would require 1) Allowing users to switch between latin and telugu characters inline and 2) a different screenplay format with multiple columns. There's no quick way to impliment either of these, but there are a couple of ways to go.

First, preferable, is a sizable refactoring of js in the screenplay editor. Multi column layouts would be easiest to impliment. Now there is just one, hard coded way way to do calculations and rendering for each line of text. Making that switchable would mean reworking calc.js, draw.js, and mouse.js. Some of it would be building from scratch, but that is probably some of the most accesable and clean code in the screenplay editor. Refactoring JS is a long term plan, but this will take time. When done, it would also have the added benifit of allowing for lots of other formats we don't support like plays, teleplays, radio drama, whatever. How to add support for inline switching of latin and telugu characters, I still don't know. I would suggest adding meta data to each JS line object that give the ranges of text that should be telugu, then catch and use that data for each calc and draw. The biggest issue with that is the screenplay editor gets to work with the assumption of monospaced characters, which makes things simple. Telugu would break that, and lots more text metric would need to be calculated.

Second possible solution is create a whole new HTML/CSS/JS editor for Telugu screenplays, then just use RawScripts for the backend. Rawscripts is almost setup to easily accept that. I'm more trying to more clearly set up the idea of Projects and Resources. A project is just a containter that holds resources. A resource is any kind of user input that requires it's own format. There are only two kinds of resources right now -- screenplay and titlepage. The input and export formats are so distinct they require their own kinds of editor and options, but they can save data in the same kind of way. Later a resource might be a sheduler, or a call sheets. Or, if the telugu screenplay format is so differant, you could create your own as a new kind of resource. Check the rawscripts/resources folder to see how they look and are working now. What still needs to be done is handling static files, and creating a good Rawscripts Standard Library in JS so each resource can easily use an API for loading data, saving, sharing, and any other kind of AJAX request.

Hope this helps, and let me know what you think.

Ritchie

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Ritchie

rawil...@gmail.com

[johnny wilson]

Is this the guy that wants to pay you?  

The option that will allow other screenplay formats would probably be the best. I have to use Final Draft to write anything for TV. 

- John