EzDrama format is a Markdown-like (or YAML-like) markup language that serves as intermediary between bare txt and TEI/XML that is ready to put on dracor.org
Plain text plays are usually not uniform enough to be converted to TEI fully automatically. With EzDrama you can manually (or semi-automatically, with simple replaces and regex; or by asking GPT to do that, that also works if you show examples in the prompt) add some uniformity without bothering with heavy-weight XML markup. To find out how to do it and how it works check Syntax and Example below.
Use this Colab Notebook to convert your play into TEI. That's the easiest way. No coding skills needed. Just click buttons.
Alternatively, you can try this basic web-app (warning, alpha-version, might break)
Lines are tagged by special symbols at the beginning:
# means first level div (e.g. Act 1)
## means second level div (e.g. Scene 1)
### means third level div... (technically the number of nesting levels is not limited)
$ means new stage direction. NB: brackets like this () are converted to stage directions automatically and do not require any special treatment with metasymbols. In case you don't want brackets to be treated as metasymbols, initialize Parser with bracketstages = False (this parameter is True by default)
NB 2: the $ will also put into the current stage tag all next lines before any new metasymbol! E.g.
$ Come John.
He unsheats a sword.
@John:
will create a stage direction
<stage>Come John. He unsheats a sword.</stage>
If you need a short inside-sp stage, use %:
% means single-line stage direction (only works inside sp):
@Egg:
%singing
Wonderful Spam!
will turn into
<sp who="#egg">
<speaker>Egg:</speaker>
<p><stage>singing</stage> Wonderful Spam!</p>
</sp>
@ means the line contains <speaker> appearance (possibly with inner stage direction in brackets). This will create an <sp> tag with a <speaker> inside it and then it will put all the following unmarked lines in the file inside that <sp> as character speech
any other line without these special symbols will be treated as direct speech of the last encoded speaker (@)
NB: dots, colons and such punctuation marks coming right after the name will be stripped from the id reference in the who attribute automatically. So @Hamlet. will сonvert to <sp who="hamlet"><speaker>Hamlet.</speaker> ... </sp>
~ means this and next untagged lines (until the next ~) within this speech will switch the boolean 'prose/verse mode' to opposite from the main (if the whole play is set to prose, the lines after ~ will be poetic text and will be encoded in <l>-s instead of a <p>; and vice versa; the main mode is set as the boolean 'is_prose' parameter of the Parser object). the next ~ will switch it back to original mode/
^ means this and next untagged lines are all part of the <castList> (and will be encoded as <castItems>)
any number (sequence of digits) followed by colon(:) will be converted to a <pb/> tag
Wonderful 5:Spam! will turn into Wonderful <pb n="5"/>Spam!
EzDrama supports commenting out parts of your file. The syntax here is the standard XML/HTML <!--comment--> syntax.
But it only works for comments that start at the start of the line. Examples that work:
<!-- commented out-->
Lovely Spam!
will turn into
<sp who="#ham">
<speaker>Ham:</speaker>
<!-- commented out-->
<p>Lovely <pb n="2"/> Spam! </p>
</sp>
Also works multiline:
@Ham:
<!-- commented
out
multi
line
-->
Lovely Spam!
will turn into
<sp who="#ham">
<speaker>Ham:</speaker>
<!-- commented out multi line-->
<p>Lovely <pb n="2"/> Spam! </p>
</sp>
You can also encode some metadata for the header in the same file:
@author means the line contains the author of the play (the name can be separated from @author by space or not, the spaces will be stripped)
@title means the line contains the main title of the play (the title can be separated from @title by space or not, the spaces will be stripped)
@subtitle means the line contains the subtitle of the play (the subtitle can be separated from @subtitle by space or not, the spaces will be stripped)
Here is a simple example. Suppose you have a txt like this:
Ham
A tragedy
By William S
Dramatis Personae
Ham
Egg
Vikings
Act 1
Scene 1
Ham: Lovely Spam!
Egg: Wonderful Spam!
Scene 2
Enter Vikings
Ham: Egg, Spam!
Sausage, and Bacon!
Vikings (singing):
Spam, Spam,(o!)
Spam, Spam, (loud)
Spam, Spam, (quiet)
Spam, and Spam
The end
With EzDrama you manually encode it like this:
@title Ham
@subtitle A tragedy
@author William S
^Dramatis Personae
Ham
Egg
Vikings
#Act 1
##Scene 1
@Ham:
Lovely Spam!
@Egg:
Wonderful Spam!
##Scene 2
$Enter Vikings
@Ham:
Egg, Spam!
Sausage, and Bacon!
@Vikings (singing):
~Spam, Spam,(o!)
Spam, Spam, (loud)
Spam, Spam, (quiet)
Spam, and Spam
$The end
And then you automatically get a TEI/XML like this:
<TEI xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0">
<teiHeader>
<fileDesc>
<titleStmt>
<title type="main">Ham</title>
<title type="sub">A tragedy</title>
<author>William S</author>
</titleStmt>
<publicationStmt>
<publisher xml:id="dracor">DraCor</publisher>
<idno type="URL">https://dracor.org</idno>
<availability>
<licence>
<ab>CC0 1.0</ab>
<ref target="https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/">
Licence</ref>
</licence>
</availability>
</publicationStmt>
<sourceDesc>
<bibl type="digitalSource">
<name>ENTER SOURCE NAME HERE</name>
<idno type="URL">ENTER SOURCE URL HERE</idno>
<availability status="free">
<p>In the public domain.</p>
</availability>
</bibl>
</sourceDesc>
</fileDesc>
<profileDesc>
<particDesc>
<listPerson>
<person xml:id="egg">
<persName>Egg</persName>
</person>
<person xml:id="ham">
<persName>Ham</persName>
</person>
<person xml:id="vikings">
<persName>Vikings</persName>
</person>
</listPerson>
</particDesc>
</profileDesc>
<revisionDesc>
<listChange>
<change when="2023-12-22">DESCRIBE CHANGE</change>
</listChange>
</revisionDesc>
</teiHeader>
<standOff>
<listEvent>
<event type="print" when="2023">
<desc/>
</event>
<event type="premiere" when="2023">
<desc/>
</event>
<event type="written" when="2023">
<desc/>
</event>
</listEvent>
<listRelation>
<relation active="INSERT" name="wikidata" passive="INSERT"/>
</listRelation>
</standOff>
<text>
<front>
<castList>
<head>Dramatis Personae</head>
<castItem>Ham</castItem>
<castItem>Egg</castItem>
<castItem>Vikings</castItem>
<castItem>
</castItem>
</castList>
</front>
<body>
<div type="act">
<head>Act 1</head>
<div type="scene">
<head>Scene 1</head>
<sp who="#ham">
<speaker>Ham:</speaker>
<p>Lovely Spam!</p>
</sp>
<sp who="#egg">
<speaker>Egg:</speaker>
<p>Wonderful Spam!</p>
</sp>
</div>
<div type="scene">
<head>Scene 2</head>
<stage>Enter Vikings</stage>
<sp who="#ham">
<speaker>Ham:</speaker>
<p>Egg, Spam!</p>
<p>Sausage, and Bacon!</p>
</sp>
<sp who="#vikings">
<speaker>Vikings:</speaker>
<stage>(singing)</stage>
<l>Spam, Spam, <stage>(o!)</stage></l>
<l>Spam, Spam, <stage>(loud)</stage></l>
<l>Spam, Spam, <stage>(quiet)</stage></l>
<l>Spam, and Spam</l>
</sp>
<stage>The end</stage>
</div>
</div>
</body>
</text>
</TEI>
Such markup would take some time to produce manually. But with EzDrama you can just produce it semi-automatically with just a handful of #-s, @-s, $-s and linebreaks.
Use this Colab Notebook to convert your play into TEI. That's the easiest way. No coding skills needed. Just click buttons. Alternatively, you can try this basic web-app (warning, alpha-version, might break)
Aside from the Colab version mentioned above, there's also an example standalone jupyter notebook. Both use the same code for easydrama engine.
If your text editor of choice is Notepad++, this user defined language syntax will help you with the markup process. To enable EzDrama syntax highlight in your Notepad++ go to language > user defined language > define your language > import, import the file, and then restart the program and select it from the Language menu.