Not to worry, Keith. I quite understand your bewilderment. I don’t know about German, but the Swedish language generally uses soft line breaks for dialogue instead of proper paragraph breaks. I’ll find a work-a-round. I always do.
To make sure we all understand each other, you mean hard line breaks, correct? I believe a soft break is a line wrapping issue, and a hard break is a true line break?
As for a work-around, that would be to use [space][space][return] between dialogue lines to force a line break, without a new paragraph.
As to whether you wish to write a script to automate that process for you, that is entirely up to you, but beyond the scope of MMD at the moment. 
There is some confusion here. Like Fletcher, I’ve always used the term “soft line break” in the Word Perfect sense (except in this thread, for the sake of reducing confusion) – a visual carriage return for the purpose of word wrapping that is not actually a literal element in the paragraph. A “hard line break” is what distinguishes one paragraph from another. A user entered spot where the current line is cut off and a new one is started.
I do not know now this current usage came to be. I guess with the complete drop of a code based word processor in the Mac market, the term “soft line break” has little meaning as it is alway invisible and completely un-alterable.
Remember when Scrivener didn’t have a keyboard shortcut for soft linebreaks? I was using Textpander to insert them. If anyone’s really having problems getting their heads around Markdown’s linebreak syntax, I suggest just setting up a macro for it. It’s got nothing to do with Scrivener.
You’re absolutely right. I mean “hard line breaks”. Sorry about this confusion – it’s painfully obvious this isn’t my industry at all. Even if I personally would prefer that a single carriage return in Scrivener became a paragraph break in MMD (as opposed to requiring a blank line) I respect the way things are now. You simply have to choose – either you go with standard word processor standards, or you go down the MMD lane.
My line break brain fever obviously caused some confusion regarding dialogue in Swedish as well. We too use a (hard) line break whenever the speaker changes and consequently also uses a new paragraph for each line. We do however not use blank lines between these paragraphs, but I guess this will be the price for using MMD’s otherwise excellent toolkit. C’e la vie.
So sorry to put you all through this demented nonsense. If you’re not clear about what you want to say you ought to shut up, right?
del
Ah, but in the output, there is no blank line.
Markdown, and therefore MMD, was designed to work around some of the inconsistencies of text files, and specifically for conversion to well-formed XHTML.
Most people write a long paragraph without hitting the enter or newline key, and their word processor wraps lines on the screen so that their paragraph doesn’t run off the edge of the monitor. Some older text editors that computer programmers use (more so than writers I imagine, but there is certainly overlap) would insert a line break at 72 or 80 characters to keep everything on screen. If you then delete part of paragraph it looks funny.
So most text editors added a “reformat paragraph” function that would rewrap the paragraph. In order to know when the paragraph ends, you need a blank line, since every line had a carriage return at the end.
Markdown uses this same philosophy. In Markdown, this:
This is the first sentence. And
this is the second sentence.
and this:
This is the first sentence. And this is the second sentence.
are the same. They are both formatted in XHTML within a single
tag without any
tags.
But when you view the XHTML in a browser (depending on your CSS of course), there is no blank line between two sequential paragraphs. If you use MMD, you will get the output you desire, you just have to format your input (i.e. your plain text) a little differently.
Yep, I know. I’m used to this way of thinking when it comes to web copy (which I mostly use Textile for, since I publish my stuff with TextPattern), but not when I write for print. There shouldn’t be any difference of course, but Scrivener RTF-support kind of threw me of track. I simply got lost between
,
, hard- and soft line breaks.
MMD works fine, although the source MMD file (with all those blank spaces) looks kind of goofy. As you said – a paradigm shift. You have to choose.
Joakim, have you seen the default LaTeX output yet? It uses indenting instead of spacing to set paragraphs apart, so your dialogue will not be separated by large chunks of space.
No, I haven’t really looked at it yet – but I’m not at all worried about the output. I’m not worried at all, actually. This discussion really straitened out a few things for me.
I originally hoped that one could write away as usual in Scrivener, with the usual word-formatting-style paragraphs, and then export it trough SP and MMD to get the proper typographic punctuation and italics (which is about all I need). I guess I wanted a source file that could be used as Textile input in my web publishing environment (no blank lines required) as well as a base for export to RTF and LaTeX. Matters got a little more complicated for me, but it’s not a big deal.
Perhaps I don’t understand the concept of Scrivener > MMD > HTML. It seems that the concept is that it is taking a Scrivener document, and converting it to MMD format prior to an HTML Export. If I read this correctly however, the assumption really is that the document is in MMD format within Scrivener. Is that correct?
Yes, you need to format your document according to MMD specs inside of Scrivener.
Cheers,
Tanja
Thanks Tanja,
That’s working pretty well now