I'm
going to create a tool to help actors study their lines in a script or
screenplay. The basic concept is that the tool will display the entire script
or screenplay with the actors’ role (his lines) in a highlighted fashion like
this:
Directive: Bob
is a geek and meets Actor 1 in a coffee shop to discuss an idea
Bob: Hi
Actor 1: Hello. I want a tool
to help me study my lines. I'd like to see each of the lines that I must
memorize in highlighted text.
Bob: Would
you like to see each characters text in a different color? For example Gray for
Bob and Purple for Actor 1.
Actor 1: That would be very
cool. I have many scripts to study and I want my lines to appear in purple bold
text for every script.
Bob: I might
use XML XSLT and maybe Umbraco to build your tool but I'm going to post a
question to the Umbraco Community before I commit to any technolgy. Just wait
here until I hear back from them. Ok?
Actor 1: Ok.
Directive: Fade
to black
Clicking on one of
the screenplay actors or directives causes all text for that particular actor
to be highlighted as above. I’m thinking
about putting the dialog and directives in RAW XML and using XSLT to style the
text on the screen.I suppose I could put
the dialog in an Umbraco document and use CSS and js to change the text size
and color.
Does anyone have an opinion on an Umbraco implementation or
am I making this too hard?
I wouldn't recommend storing the screenplays in Umbraco if that means you'll have to type them in - but if you've already got the possibility of exporting them to an XML format (there probably is one already, right?), Umbraco would be perfect for managing them all. Then you could just have each single screenplay be an upload field (or a MultiNode Tree Picker) and point to it from the screenplay's main node. The way you'd display them could then be handled basically like you'd handle an RSS feed - loading the XML file and transforming its contents.
You should definitely handle all the color-toggling with CSS and JavaScript.
Thanks for taking the time to respond Chriztian. I did in fact, start the project using Umbraco 4.7 and it's off to a pretty good start. Most screenplays are delivered in word or pdf format so there's no plan to do much typing. I like your idea about displaying them like an RSS feed. Originally, I was thinking that the color-toggling could be handled in the XSLT. My rational was that each line of text must be parsed and styled based on the xml tags. But converting Word and PDFs to well formed XML is not a simple one-button-export, especially with PDFs. So the next choice is to paste the screenplay into an Umbraco document and syle the text based on the first n charaters of the string or <p>.
My other reason for attempting this in XSLT was to advance my skills and knowlege with XSLT styling. I've been able to create some simple dynamic styling of the elements and markup in the xslt file (umbTopNavigation.xslt) but I'm challenged on how to change the styling of <div id="pagecontainer> or <div id="body"> identified in the master template, from within the xslt files. No clue yet on how to style the first n chars of the text in the umbraco:Item, field="bodyText. I definately have more research to do on the topic of XSLT. It may just be a matter of time before I bail on XSLT route and give in to the "too easy" CSS-JS plan.
Umbraco with CSS or RAW XML XSLT?
I'm going to create a tool to help actors study their lines in a script or screenplay. The basic concept is that the tool will display the entire script or screenplay with the actors’ role (his lines) in a highlighted fashion like this:
Directive: Bob is a geek and meets Actor 1 in a coffee shop to discuss an idea
Bob: Hi
Actor 1: Hello. I want a tool to help me study my lines. I'd like to see each of the lines that I must memorize in highlighted text.
Bob: Would you like to see each characters text in a different color? For example Gray for Bob and Purple for Actor 1.
Actor 1: That would be very cool. I have many scripts to study and I want my lines to appear in purple bold text for every script.
Bob: I might use XML XSLT and maybe Umbraco to build your tool but I'm going to post a question to the Umbraco Community before I commit to any technolgy. Just wait here until I hear back from them. Ok?
Actor 1: Ok.
Directive: Fade to black
Clicking on one of the screenplay actors or directives causes all text for that particular actor to be highlighted as above. I’m thinking about putting the dialog and directives in RAW XML and using XSLT to style the text on the screen. I suppose I could put the dialog in an Umbraco document and use CSS and js to change the text size and color.
Does anyone have an opinion on an Umbraco implementation or am I making this too hard?
-markq
Hi markq,
I wouldn't recommend storing the screenplays in Umbraco if that means you'll have to type them in - but if you've already got the possibility of exporting them to an XML format (there probably is one already, right?), Umbraco would be perfect for managing them all. Then you could just have each single screenplay be an upload field (or a MultiNode Tree Picker) and point to it from the screenplay's main node. The way you'd display them could then be handled basically like you'd handle an RSS feed - loading the XML file and transforming its contents.
You should definitely handle all the color-toggling with CSS and JavaScript.
Off to a good start?
/Chriztian
Thanks for taking the time to respond Chriztian. I did in fact, start the project using Umbraco 4.7 and it's off to a pretty good start. Most screenplays are delivered in word or pdf format so there's no plan to do much typing. I like your idea about displaying them like an RSS feed. Originally, I was thinking that the color-toggling could be handled in the XSLT. My rational was that each line of text must be parsed and styled based on the xml tags. But converting Word and PDFs to well formed XML is not a simple one-button-export, especially with PDFs. So the next choice is to paste the screenplay into an Umbraco document and syle the text based on the first n charaters of the string or <p>.
My other reason for attempting this in XSLT was to advance my skills and knowlege with XSLT styling. I've been able to create some simple dynamic styling of the elements and markup in the xslt file (umbTopNavigation.xslt) but I'm challenged on how to change the styling of <div id="pagecontainer> or <div id="body"> identified in the master template, from within the xslt files. No clue yet on how to style the first n chars of the text in the umbraco:Item, field="bodyText. I definately have more research to do on the topic of XSLT. It may just be a matter of time before I bail on XSLT route and give in to the "too easy" CSS-JS plan.
Thanks again for your input.
-markq
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