General ⇒ Formatting stage plays

[dguaspari]

I'm writing a simple set of LaTeX macros for formatting the scripts of plays and have run into a problem. Suppose that Hamlet has a speech that runs from one page to the next. The page on which the speech begins should have the usual formatting

HAMLET
Blah blah ...
Blah blah ...

and the page on which it continues should look something like this

(HAMLET, CNTD.)
Blah blah ...
Blah blah ...

I'd be grateful for any help toward a solution. Ideally, the solution would be consistent with the macros I already have (which work fine, except for this one annoyance).

Currently, the LaTeX source for this speech looks like:

\Ham Blah blah blah...

and I would very much like to preserve that form, as opposed to, something like

\Ham{Blah blah blah ...}

which users would not like and would very likely cause further complications (when, for example, certain kinds of stage directions are embedded within a speech).

Currently, the unrolling of macros has the effect of making the definition

\newcommand{\Ham}[1]
{<adjust vertical spacing> <adjust horizontal spacing> HAMLET\nobreak}

Note that, despite this command's having an argument, no "#1" appears in the definition. The reason is that I don't ever want to have a page break between "HAMLET" and the first line of his speech -- and it turns out that that the \nobreak command doesn't suffice to guarantee that. Having the first character in the subsequent speech count as the argument to this command seems to prevent the pagebreak. (I don't recall why I thought I needed the \nobreak, too.) Pretty clumsy.


David Guaspari


Edit by localghost: No e-mail addresses in posts (see Board Rules). There will be no support this way.

[localghost]

Take a look at the CTAN Catalogue [1]. There are several classes and packages that support typesetting this kind of document.

[1] The TeX Catalogue Online, Topic Index - Poetry and Drama


Best regards
Thorsten