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lostplot:manual:writer_linking

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MarkDown and Fountain

What are MarkDown and Fountain?

MarkDown and Fountain are standard text enhancement systems utilising tags which can be embedded into normal raw text which:

  • Informs processors using stylesheets on how to present text in a particular manner, based upon the provided tags, but
  • Provides tags which are for the most part unobtrusive to the reader of the raw text, and can get a sense of meaning from them even without applied styles.

MarkDown is a more general standard intended originally to ease the way in which documents could be formatted in the internet era but without the need to learn the intricacies of HTML and CSS. It is MarkDown, enhanced with custom LostPlot tags which is mainly used within the LostPlot application.

Fountain is a syntax dedicated screenwriting and is used only when LostPlot is in a screenwriting mode. Fountain includes standard scriptwriting instructions such as the type of paragraph being written (an Action, Scene, Dialog etc), information on transitions and such like. As these tags are not useful in the conventional authoring process and may actually be misinterpreted for text intended to be conventional, they only become enabled within a screenwriting project.


Jumping between document locations

For the purposes of development, it is often useful (to the author) to link events in one location in the Document pane to another, even if that other location is technically in another Index Card.

In order to do this, we can create a hyperlink (see adding Emphasis) to another, named internal location.

To create a target location:

  • Go to the position in the target Index Card required and enter a unique word or phrase that identifies this location. The text will not appear visually in the document pane.
  • Select the unique word or phrase and select the [Jump Target] option from the [Emphasis] menu. This will wrap the text in the @@ symbol, indicating that it is now a target.

To create the hyperlink to the target:

  • Go to the original location where you want the hyperlink to reside.
  • Enter the normal text that will represent the link - very often, this is normal text which would otherwise be simply read as part of the document.
  • Select the text, then the [Hyperlink] option from the [Emphasis] menu. This will wrap the text in a normal hyperlink tags - replace the link part of the tag with a hash (#) followed by the text used for the target.

For example:

We have written an historical text referring to the Harrowing Of The North. We want the initial mention of this phrase to link to a note in an appendix card at the end of the document.

Step 1 - Create the note in the appendix card

# The Harrowing Of The North @@harrowing@@

Note that we have added the jump target to the end of the Header line, as all headers tags must be at the beginning of the line.

Step 2 - Make the initial mention into a hypertext link

While Jennifer drove around North Yorkshire and Durham, she occasionally heard the term [The Harrowing of The North](#harrowing), which she had not encountered before…

The term The Harrowing of The North will not jump to the appendix text when clicked.

Note: If experimenting with this technique, ensure that your hyperlink and jump target are some distance apart in your document. If the two would naturally appear on the Document pane on the same visible page in any case, no apparent movement will take place.



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lostplot/manual/writer_linking.1637065161.txt.gz · Last modified: 2021/11/16 12:19 by admin