Acts and scenes

Headings start in column one with one or two # characters followed by whitespace. Their meaning depends on the whole body’s heading mode.

Scripts with acts

# Act One

## A garden. Dusk.

The garden is empty.

## The hallway.

Because the body contains a raw ## heading line, # denotes an Act and ## denotes a Scene. The text after the prefix is the heading content; it is not parsed into separate scene-number and title fields.

For example, a heading containing 1 — A garden. Dusk. retains that whole text. The number is not an ID or a separate numbering directive in the file format.

Scripts without acts

# A garden. Dusk.

The garden is empty.

# The hallway.

When the body has no raw column-one ## followed by whitespace, its # headings are Scenes. A single # Act One line therefore does not establish an Act by its title alone.

The reader prescans raw lines before applying speech recognition. Even a ## line accidentally left inside a speech affects this mode. Writers should keep actual headings outside speech and choose a consistent heading scheme.

Boundaries and collisions

• Separate a heading from a preceding speech with a blank line. While speech is active, heading-looking text follows speech rules.
• An indented # is not a column-one heading. A prefix without following whitespace is not a heading either.
• There are no ### subscene headings in this grammar.
• To represent heading-looking text as an action, use column-one !, for example !# The sign is painted on the door.

Writer output

The reference writer checks whether its document contains any Acts. It emits Acts with #, and Scenes with ## when Acts are present. Without Acts, it emits Scenes with #. Heading text is trimmed on writing.

A Scene resets the reader’s current open-music number. See Music endings before carrying a numbered musical unit across that boundary.

Continue with Cues, dialogue and asides.