Expanding Fountain Flow

Basically Fountain Flow is a text markup processor for Vim, and the markup of choice is Fountain syntax for screenplays.

I had an idea to alter this somewhat and make a Fiction Flow processor, for shaking down Markdown-style text into an ebook-ready document. I got as far as testing an early version, when it occurred to me -- why am I doing this all over again? After all, Fountain itself is simply an extension of simpler markup, particularly Markdown. So instead of creating separate scripts that duplicate much of the same code, it seems to make sense to have the Flow script apply extensions conditionally.

By processing the core markup the same, and the extensions conditionally, Fountain Flow could easily support not just traditional screenplays, but teleplays, A/V scripts, and stage plays, as well as short stories and novels. Even storyboards could be supported under this scheme. The advantage of this, of course, is that the core work is done within Vim instead of a bloated word processor.

One way the format could be defined is through the title page block. One line could simply say, for example, "Format: screenplay". Since a given work is either a screenplay or it isn't, hardcoding the format name into the document seems a more sensible option than having to metaphorically pull a lever for screenplay every time you process a revision of a screenplay, while at the same time allowing for easy switching when a different format is required. A story submission and an ebook would both draw from the same basic markup syntax, but changing the line from "Format: short story" to "Format: ebook" would alter the presentation of that same core document.

This will require a little more discipline with the support files. Instead of loose templates and stylesheets, there should be a theme file that contains all the necessary data. Some of these would have to come in different flavors--there is more than one way, for instance, to format an ebook.

I've had too many sick days lately, but hopefully I'll charge forward on the changes now. I hope those folks who have downloaded this and tried it out are happy with it so far.