My two main inspirations for Transdown were John Gruber’s Markdown and John August’s Fountain. The inspirational lineage is so strong that I chose the name Transdown to reflect that heritage. And, much of the syntax descends from their ideas about what these languages are and how they should work.
The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make it as readable as possible. The idea is that a Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions. <footer>John Gruber in Introduction to Markdown</footer>
Fountain is not an app. It’s not even really a file format. It’s a simple set of straightforward rules for writing a screenplay in plain text….Fountain is designed to “just work” if you simply typed some text that looked like a screenplay.
Let’s examine a snippet of raw transcript from my dissertation. This kind of example could be straight out of an Inqscribe file you’re currently working on.
| Your raw transcript snippet | How Transdown interprets that snippet |
### Rebecca's Gestural Pseudo-Coding [33:33] Rebecca: and then my thinking at least, is you should be able to, um, say that "star p of i" /mmhmm/ equals, uh, the title, and then you just do i++, so then it’ll ![makes looping gesture with left hand][1] /OK/ [34:00] Rebecca: and you just keep ![left hand makes horizontal chops in the air, like rungs down a ladder][2] [1]: /images/rebecca1.jpg [2]: /images/rebecca2.png |
Episode Title Conversational Turn Conversational Turn List of References to Media ``` |
Transdown assumes your transcript will be built of blocks, which are just lines of source text separated by one or more blank lines.
These two lines
Are separated by a blank line
These two lines
have no blank line in between
Transcripts are organized around episodes. You can denote the title of an episode using ATX-style header syntax, which just means beginning a line