patakatha

Patakatha (Sanskrit पटकथा: a screenplay — literally the screen's story, paṭa the screen and kathā the tale). The script as the trade sets it, and nothing beyond that: a FIXED-PITCH page, which is the whole of it — twelve-point Courier at ten characters and six lines to the inch, on US Letter with margins of one inch and one and a half at the inner edge, giving SIXTY COLUMNS BY FIFTY-FOUR LINES exactly, with one page running one minute. Six elements and no more, each told apart by a stated test rather than a guess: a slugline is a shouted line opening INT., EXT., EST. or I/E.; a transition is a shouted line ending TO:, IN: or OUT:, or FADE OUT. read whole; a character cue is a shouted line no longer than the name column, not ending in a colon, and answered by a non-blank line; what follows a cue is dialogue until a blank line ends the speech, and a bracketed line inside it is a parenthetical; everything else is action. Their columns are arithmetic on the measure: action and slugline at column 0 across 60, dialogue at 10 across 35, a parenthetical at 16 across 20, a cue at 22 across 33, and a transition flush right at column 60. Two blank lines before a scene heading, one before action, a cue and a transition, none before a parenthetical or a line of speech; a blank line never opens a page; a slugline never stands as a page's last line and a cue never as its last two. THE TEXT IS NEVER ALTERED, and that is the whole carefulness of it: UPPER CASE IS HOW THE GRAMMAR READS A LINE AND NEVER HOW IT SETS ONE, so a lower-case scene heading stays lower-case and is simply not a scene heading; wrapping breaks only at spaces, so a word longer than its column stands alone and overruns the column rather than being cut; every element carries its byte offsets in the source it was read from and is a byte-exact slice of it; and every character no element covers is one of a declared separator alphabet, so a dropped line would stand in a gap as its own letters. THE PAGE COUNT IS THE FORMAT'S OWN AND IS COUNTED HERE — a fixed-pitch page is arithmetic, not typesetting — which is exactly where this water parts from the-pandulipi, whose paged HTML only a print engine can measure. No (MORE) and no (CONT'D) is written; no scene numbers, no revision marks, no dual dialogue, no title-page key block, and no A4 measure invented. No clock, no disk, no network, no host global, zero imports: a work in, a laid script out, and nothing throws.