Preparing TitleFactory Input Files

TitleFactory has the ability to read a number of different types of files, however,  the basic form of the input files must be text.  TitleFactory can read files that are scripts, transcripts, screenplays, and timecoded subtitle files whose format, is user-definable. 

Script files

Prepare script text files  for TitleFactory.  Any number of script packages can work with the TitleFactory.  The only requirement is that the text exist in a normal TXT file.  This file can be written directly from many popular text editors.  They can also be created by simply performing a copy and a paste into Notepad or Wordpad.

TitleFactory has certain requirements which must be met for the script files to be processed correctly. The product must be able to distinguish paragraphs, sentences, direction, and special script text such as character names.

The product distinguishes paragraphs by looking for new line characters. The program distinguishes sentences by looking for a end-of-sentence punctuation which is configurable in the input settings menu.  Continuation marks such as '...' will result in 3 blank sentences.  On the other hand, paragraphs that do not contain any sentences (i.e., no .! or ?) are ignored.

The software has the ability to skip certain lines, that is, lines beginning with specified characters, lines that are before or after some specified range, lines before or after some specified text, lines containing no lower case alpha characters.

Cutting and pasting text into a text file does not always work with TitleFactory.  Some packages use their own special characters to represent a character when display on a screen and then translate it before printing it.  MS Word, for example, uses a special character for an apostrophe (‘’).  The normal representation of an apostrophe is a '''.  Similar characters are used to specify colons (;). The characters will not be recognized by the TitleFactory.  When using MS Word, using a 'Save As' > .txt file will result in the correct display of the characters.

Script files can be wrapped (this is where each line of text ends with a newline character or carriage return) or Unwrapped (where a paragraph of text is all on a single record and automatic wrapping is used).

TitleFactory converts all Wrapped text to Unwrapped when it first reads a file.

Timecoded Text files

TitleFactory can read timecoded text files which are produced elsewhere.  These files contain pre-existing timecodes and subtitle text.  There are a great number of formats used for timecoded subtitle files.  TitleFactory includes a method where files can be defined to it so that literally thousands of different formats can be supported.Refer to Timecode Definitions documentation for more details.

Exact

TitleFactory can read subtitle text that has already been formatted.  The subtitle text will be placed on images exactly as they are specified.  Text for different images must be separated by a completely empty line.

Example:

This is an example of line 1 of image numer 1

and this is the line 2 text of the same image,

while this contains image 2 text

and this contain image 3 text (line 1).

This is Image 3 line 2 text.

Examples

Examples of all of these formats are included in the samples directory.