Settings for PrintProfile Section

[BirdCatcherGames]

I have a miniscule change I want to make. I have a combination of a tools to leverage the fountain file format to make visual novels. The screenplay layout translates flawlessly onto visual novel narration and dialogues.

To make the in game menus with branching dialogue choices, what's been most effective is to use sections. I can nest sections to make deeper and deeper branches, I can jump out of branches by moving to a new section at a higher depth, etc, or using Transitions. When I transform the .foutain file into in-game assets, I can take all the sections that are at the same level under a scene parse them into menu options.

I have a whole workflow for this and it's nearly perfect. Where Better Fountain comes into play is that it's the best tool for creating PDF's to give to people for feedback. Giving feedback on the script without having to play the game is significantly faster, and I can also get feedback from writers who aren't familiar with visual novels.

The tiny, tiny thing I need is that, because sequences are how I'm defining menus, it'd be great if I could make the sequences in the PDF exports solid black and bold. Right now people can navigate around the script with the bookmarks and understand where the dialogues branch, but if you're just reading top to bottom it's easy to miss.

https://github.com/BirdCatcherGamesOrg/betterfountain/blob/ad9e3ddecbac4e45289d0e7addfc126690d586c2/src/pdf/print.ts#L105

I'm very comfortable with writing software, but I have no idea how to write, test, or contribute to a vscode extension. I'll be able to eventually figure this out on my own, but it'd be awesome if you could give me a 2 or 3 sentence summary and a quick link or two in the repo where I'll need to make this change and surface this as a setting, presumably next to the Pdf: Print Sections flag.

Let me know if you'd be interested in a pull request for this as well, otherwise I'll just keep it in my fork. I envision I'll be making more changes that further integrate my visual novel SDK into your plugin, so I might do more regular contributions here and there.

Thank you for your work, happy to give you a well-deserved sponsorship!

[piersdeseilligny]

@BirdCatcherGames that's such a cool use of fountain! Formatting for PDFs is indeed defined in print.ts

There's two print profiles, "a4" and "usletter", with "usletter" being an extension of "a4" (with changes being made to the a4 profiles on lines 115-126).

The printing profile is then utilized in pdfmaker.ts in order to format and generate the pdf.

However, a lot of the formatting which isn't print-profile dependant is actually hard-coded in pdfmaker.ts, which includes stuff like the color of sections or if they're bold or not. A lot of this happens in the doc.text2 function, which is called to actually print text onto the PDF, including here within pdfmaker's "generate" function, which is what goes through each line of the pre-parsed fountain document to print it out onto a PDF.

A sensible "temporary fix" (until a neater solution that utilizes fully user-customizable printing profiles) is definitely what you're suggesting, which is to surface it as a setting. You can add the setting in package.json, maybe as another boolean. You'd then need to update the FountainConfig class to include the new setting, at which point pdfmaker.ts will be able to access the setting via the object "cfg" that's in the "generate" function.

I'm not going to lie, i can't quite remember how some of these bits work, as some of it was written 6-7 years ago, but hopefully this helps!