Story Markup

The story stream supports plain paragraphs plus a small set of structural and media cues.

Inline Text

Markdown emphasis is supported inside paragraphs and headings:

*italic* or _italic_
**bold** or __bold__
***bold italic*** or ___bold italic___

SmartyPants processing still runs after markup parsing, so straight quotes, apostrophes, and dashes are converted typographically before layout and hyphenation.

Paragraphs And Sections

Plain narrative is rendered paragraph by paragraph. Each ordinary paragraph uses the normal first-line indent, and adjacent paragraphs are not separated by a blank line.

Use an explicit section marker when the next paragraph should begin a new text block:

::section

The first paragraph of the section begins here.

The second paragraph begins here.

The first paragraph after ::section is not horizontally indented.
It gets one line of vertical separation from previous content.
Following paragraphs use the normal first-line indent.

Paragraphs are separated by one or more blank lines. Single newlines inside a paragraph are normalized to spaces.

Chapters

Use:

::chapter[The House on the Hill]

The first paragraph begins here.

The second paragraph begins here.

The chapter heading is rendered in the same font and size as block text, centered and italic. The first following paragraph is unindented and marked for a three-line drop cap. Following paragraphs are indented normally.

Images

Image blocks are parsed, queued, and emitted as future media blocks, but image rendering is not implemented yet.

::image[widescreen](mansion-rain.jpg)
::image[portrait](portrait-letter.jpg)

widescreen means 100% page width and 50% page height. portrait means 100% page width and 100% page height. Filenames are relative to the future image directory.

Sound Effects

Sound effects can appear inside regular paragraphs:

The door opens {{sfx:door-creak.ogg}} and the hall exhales.

The marker is removed from displayed text and TTS text. It is preserved as a timed cue and emitted when the word animation reaches the marker position. Actual preload and playback are not implemented yet.

The animation engine emits story:media-cue with type: "sfx", filename, wordIndex, and delay.

Music

Music can be queued as a block:

::music[crossfade, loop, lead=4](rain-theme.ogg)

It can also be placed inline:

The candles gutter. {{music:cut:danger.ogg}} Something moves upstairs.

Supported modes are:

queue: play after the current track finishes.
crossfade: crossfade from the current track to the new one.
cut: stop the current track and start the new one immediately.
loop or once: whether the track repeats.
lead=<seconds>: how long the music plays alone before the next text/TTS paragraph starts.

Inline music markers emit story:media-cue. Block music directives emit story:media-block; block directives also delay the following paragraph when lead is set.

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