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ShortCutsMarkup-Talk

Use Case: Dialogue and complex wikistyles

I wanted to share an actual use case where I decided to use this recipe and it's working out pretty well. I've set up expansion for 1-2 text characters between periods so I can easily type shortcuts without having to contort my typing hands reaching for unusual combinations. I came up with a prototype in a couple hours of mucking around with a local installation of PmWiki. Consider this could be used for dialogue scenes, writing screenplays, creating consistent sub-sections on a page easily, etc. I'm using this on my Mac laptop, so I have my font database available to me. I added the wikicolorsplus.php recipe to expand the number of colors available, and I had fun with it. Here's a snippet of the shortcuts I created for making styles (breaks with \ indicate lines should be joined):

:x::%firebrick font-family="Newt Serif" font-size=larger%Aliessa:\
%firebrick font-family="Newt Serif" font-size=larger%
:a::%midnightblue italic  font-family="Alegreya" font-size=larger%Almerissa:\
%midnightblue italic  font-family="Alegreya" font-size=larger%
:b::%brown font-family="NewRocker" font-size=larger%Buck:\
%brown font-family="NewRocker" font-size=larger%

This creates a :definition:list with the name of the speaker in the same color & font as the text they're saying. Of course you can use this idea for other uses as well. Saves lots of typing, keeps things consistent easily. To keep which expansion is which straight, I created a cheatsheet in the sidebar:

*.x. - x
*.a. - a
*.b. - b

And that shows not only the name that will display and the expansion code to use, it also shows it in the color/style it will be on the page. (In a public wiki, I would use conditional statements to only show it to the people who should see it.)

To continue to the next paragraph use 2 linebreaks: \\ and the wikistyle and indent for dialogue will be kept because it's in the same <dl> block.

So I thought this was an interesting enough use that others might be inspired by it. XES September 17, 2017, at 07:26 AM