Re: [libreoffice-users] styles for plays?

Helen wrote:
> I've volunteered to edit a one-time publication of a collection of plays.
> The plays came to me
> in different styles -- three of the plays came to me with all the
> characters's speaking lines
>   centered -- the characters's names centered a line above.
>
> Some of the writers seem to have centered the names with a centering code
> -- I can
> highlight the name and use the "left margin" code to move the name to left
> margin.  Others
> seem to have centered by spacing over! (yes)  and I have to backspace until
> I get the name
> to the left margin.
>
> None used a colon after the speaker, and the publisher wants it.  I've made
> some progress with
> Search & Replace --  Search for all incidents of TOM and replace with TOM
> colon space. But the
> most tedious part is moving TOM from center to left and bring his speaking
> lines up to begin
> on the same line.  Is there any way I can put these plays into a style
> sheet and save this work, or
> would creating  the style sheet take as long as what I'm doing?  I've never
> used styles.  And this is a one-time
> job so if I have to do it all by hand, at least it's only once.
>
> Thanks for any advice,
Helen
Not sure this is helpful ... Things are so context dependent ... Let me 
preface my remarks with:
(1) send a sample file to me (off line, if you like) and I could take a 
look at it and see what I might be able to do?
(2) depends on the results of step 1

And so, on to what I have thought of so far ...

First I thought "Macro" (which I don't do anything with, so no help there)
Second I thought "gawk" ... and I played with that with some degree of 
success ...

Steps:
(1) save document as (plain) txt (no encoding)
(2) in a terminal window, apply this command to the *.txt file ...
    awk '{gsub(/^[ \t]+|[ \t]+$/,"")};1' <filename.txt >newfilename.txt
... this removes all leading (and trailing) white space, and everything 
is left justified.  It takes out spaces, tabs, and centering, and the 
result would look like this ...
Tom
said one
Tom
said two
Tom
said three
... and LibreOffice can open and edit the new *.txt file.

That doesn't get the "speaker's" line adjoined or insert the necessary : 
either, but depending upon context something might be made to do the job?

Regards
Fred James

PS: credit where credit is due: I found that little one-liner at 
<http://www.pement.org/awk/awk1line.txt>


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