OvHTML v0.41ß2

Click here for OvHTML for Windows

What is OvHTML?

"OvHTML" is a filter for Ovation Pro that allows you to import HTML documents.
It supports a variety of HTML tags, GIF and JPEG images, and it'll try to render to something akin to HTML 2.0 (ie, it doesn't do tables or frames), roughly similar to what you would expect to see in Fresco™ or Oregano™.

There are a multitude of options. I think it is safe to say that the output created is so close to Fresco™ (when running it with tables/frames disabled) that I've found myself clicking a blue underlined word in the Ovation Pro window and wondering why nothing happened ... on more than one occasion!

But, it doesn't stop there!

The original concept...

My original aim for OvHTML was to read the Buffy shooting scripts.
Most of these are in a 'centred' table, and all the text is in "Verdana". Well, I'd prefer no table, and the dialogue to be in Corpus, with the dialogue attribution to be in bold. Amazingly, OvHTML can do this for me! There is a 'translation' system that allows you to replace one HTML tag with another, mess with certain aspects of the parser output, etc etc.

But wait...

There's even more! A special <ovhtml ...> tag allows you to define certain aspects of the output - most usefully the base text size and the base leading. So no longer does the "Nurse Betty" screenplay look messy on A4, just make the text a tad smaller, and let it roll.
If you'd prefer instead to simply read on-screen, just select the 'page' size appropriate to your screen resolution.

And...

And there's more! A special <scripter> tag will call the "Scripter" system.
This is an HTML-like scripting system designed by me that you can use to write screenplays. It is a part of OvHTML as it shares a lot of the parsing methodology.

Oh no, more!?!?

And there's more (good god!)... After running OvHTML, you'll notice Ovation Pro has three "save" options... Document, DDL, and... you guessed it, HTML ! The HTML output is not very good (early days), but it's a hell of a lot better than doing it by hand from ASCII or DDL output...

If you have ever thought of writing a screenplay or teleplay, or if you've ever wondered about importing/exporting HTML to/from Ovation Pro, then OvHTML is what you need.

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IT IS COMPLETELY FREE!
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And to defend myself and explain something...

On 2006/05/15, Peter Young wrote in reply to somebody asking for help with OvHTML:

    Not a straight answer, but I hope helpful.

    I have bad memories of OvHTML, which I could never make work
    satisfactorily. Why not try Ray Favre's !meDDLe, from
    http://www.rayfavre.me.uk/dwapps.html which works much better, IMHO?

As you can expect, I don't like reading messages like that about my software - though I will openly acknowledge that the exporter within OvHTML does not output perfect legal HTML, this is a quick hack to translate OvationPro documents back to HTML, it is NOT Word, okay people? It is designed to give you a head start over "Export as text...", that's all.
Furthermore, for all of Peter's "bad memories", I may not be the easiest person to get in touch with given my limited Internet access, but I'm not aware of any messages from Peter regarding his problems.

The above was in response to the following, by Rodger Davis on 2006/05/15:

    I use OvHTML quite often to produce HTML attachments
    for emails. I have two problems:

    Problem 1. 
    I need to write a lot of lines
    like this
    with only a 
    few words on
    each line
    and, for instance, they should all be in blue.
    What I find is that the first line comes out
    in blue and all the rest in black.
    Now I can get over this by selecting each line
    of words separately and 'turning them blue'.

    Am I doing something wrong?

I have not looked into this at all, but it is possible that you are using RETURN to create the line breaks, which OvHTML should interpret as a newline - this may mean it clears the colour codes (most likely in order to catch unspecified problems in the DDL parser).
Try using Shift-RETURN, does that work on RISC OS?

    Problem 2.
    Though the documentation of OvHTML suggests that 
    you can export text in several fonts (e.g. monospaced,
    serif, sans and 'fancy' at least), I cannot get this to
    work at all.

    When I examine the HTML file produced, it does not show
    any mention of fonts ... if some text is in Homerton
    amongst a lot of Trinity  and I examine the HTML file
    there is no 'font switched on' before the Homerton
    or 'switch off' after.

This is an unfortunate bug that crept in with the font referencing. If I recall correctly, it was a case of "if (this = that)", which any C programmer will know should be "if (this == that)", which strangely enough the compiler didn't report to me!

Both of these problems are unlikely to be resolved, as I do not use my RISC OS computer that much any more, and hence am unlikely to do any major work to OvHTML on RISC OS (it is already a few versions behind the Windows one!). In lieu of this, the source codes are available. Look on the newsgroups or ask me!

Some piccies!

Choosing or defining page sizes, with the configuration panel on the lower left.

The font effects test, as rendered by Oregano v1.10 and by Ovation Pro (via OvHTML).
Shall I point out that Oregano doesn't seem to understand strikeout? :-)

Left to right:
Fresco 2.26/3.20
Ovation Pro 2.70 & OvHTML 0.36g
Browse 2.07
Webite 1.49 (HTML 2.0 browser)
As you can see, the rendering of OvHTML is based, mostly, on the rendering of Fresco.

This is what MSIE v3.02 (yes, an old one!) made of the same document.

Saving a file as an HTML document.

The HTML export in progress...

An exported document as seen in Fresco, the original Ovation Pro document, and a tiny bit of the HTML shown in Edit.
As you can see, the HTML is not perfect and will require assistance from you; but on the other hand, it isn't a bad start...

Changes since the last release (v0.40):

In a nutshell:

Additions to the Scripter protocol. Sadly, Scripter is now on revision 3 so OvHTML is still lagging behind, it doesn't do <ind>...</ind> or <revised> - these will be added Real Soon Now.
Export input parser now copes with Windows/DOS style line termination so it'll read a DDL file created with OvationPro for Windows - so long as the image type is understood, it won't cope with BMPs (then again, neither will Ovation Pro for RISC OS afaik).
Better exporter. It now makes HTML that (mostly) passes sgmls to HTML 3.2's dtd. If you use the Strict option, it should pass without a problem.
Note that lists, hrefs, headings, and the like are not supported - you'll need to add these by hand.
Some more configuration options.

And, the long-winded list from the Versions file:

0.41   2003/10/16

       New configuration file format. OvHTML will automatically convert it
       it you. Note that it is not backwardly compatible (well, you'd get
       some milage out of replacing the first byte '&03' with '&02', if you
       really MUST go back to an earlier version of OvHTML than v0.41.

       Added Exporter options, you'll find these where the URI options used
       to be, and the URI options in the General Options.

       You can choose to disable FONT FACE, FONT SIZE, and/or FONT COLOUR.
       The font face is automatically disabled in 'Stricter' mode.

       You can also configure sparse HTML, or strict HTML as previously
       described. If you don't want these options always on, you can set them
       using the aforementioned CTRL and/or SHIFT keypresses - but this is
       only "for now".

       You'll see some other options "coming soon". Don't bother with using
       an icon enabler patch, selecting the 'shaded' options will alter your
       configuration, but won't cause anything else to happen, at least not
       in this build.

       By accessing the Secret Power User Options window, you can also
       tailor if the PICT/PICTURE relationship is +1 or -1. As this is a
       Power User option, it is left for Power Users to figure out how the
       Power User window is opened... :-)

       Trapped bad font colour pulled from stack. This is a bug somewhere
       else, I'll look into it when I have some time free as I don't expect
       it to be a "here I am, come and get me!" type of bug.

       Added support (in a number of places) for CRLF style linefeeds. These
       are used in the DDL files created by Ovation Pro for Windows. In
       particular, the image extraction get messed up by it.
       Note that it expects either &0A or &0D,&0A as a line ending. Anything
       else (&0D or &0A,&0D) is not valid.



0.41ß  2003/10/19

       Added "<adbreak>" to Scripter.

       Added day/night to scene title display.

       Both Scripter (OvHTML) and Scripter (for DOS) follow the re-revised
       Scripter protocol. Various code modifications (in both versions) to
       rationalise how things were handled.

       If you plan to walk the source - note that adbreaks are a SCENE, with
       bit 4 set. In order to maintain sensible scene numbering, you must
       count the scenes manually - as adbreaks don't get counted.
       Adbreak has bit four of the flags set (AND with 16), no other flags
       and/or relevant array variables have any meaning, their contents
       should not be assumed.




0.41ß2 2003/10/20

       Modifications to the HTML export, now it does get all the tags in
       the proper place. Yipee!

       The Scripter parser still suffers from the "missing space" problem,
       but only three such omissions in a 62 page script, not bad. :-)

       Changed the MakeFile so that the "main" module is rebuilt EVERY time
       anything is rebuilt (doesn't take long), so the time and date reported
       are always exactly up to date.

Software status:

  Software name        : OvHTML
  Latest version       : 0.41ß2

  Archive size         : 220770 bytes
  Classification       : Freeware
  Registration cost    : None

  RISC OS 2 compatible : No
  RISC OS 3 compatible : Yes
  WIMP 3.98 compatible : Yes
  RISC OS 4 compatible : Untested, should work okay
  32bit RISC OS        : OvHTML will work, but see the notes below...

  Written in           : C and assembler
  Libraries            : DeskLib32

Running !OvHTML on an Iyonix:

All of OvHTML is compiled to be 26/32 neutral, so it will work on any RISC OS machine with RISC OS 3.10 or later.
The supplied InterGIF may not be 32 compatible - I do not know. However it is a separate program called as a subtask, so it should work via Aemulor if not natively.
OvHTML appreciates the presence of !ChangeFSI. It will work without, but with correspondingly lesser results.

OvHTML v0.41ß2 UPGRADE download

ovh041b2.zip (216K) Version 0.41ß2
2003/10/20 UPGRADE version of OvHTML 0.41ß2.
THIS IS ONLY AN UPGRADE. IF YOU DO NOT HAVE VERSION 0.40 ALREADY INSTALLED, YOU WILL NEED TO DOWNLOAD ANS INSTALL THAT VERSION FIRST, AND THEN COPY THIS UPGRADE OVER TOP OF IT.

This software requires RISC OS running on the ARM chipset
If your computer is different, don't bother downloading this software!

OvHTML v0.40 download

ovh040.zip (451K) Version 0.40
2003/10/14 Standard version of OvHTML 0.40, with all documentation.
The examples are not supplied, download the archive below if you would like the example documents.

This software requires RISC OS running on the ARM chipset
If your computer is different, don't bother downloading this software!

OvHTML examples download

ovhex.zip 2003/08/16 Standard example documents to show various features of OvHTML, including how it handles bad input...

This software requires RISC OS running on the ARM chipset
If your computer is different, don't bother downloading this software!

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*OvHTML v0.41ß2 UPGRADE* download**
ovh041b2.zip (216K)	Version 0.41ß2 2003/10/20	UPGRADE version of OvHTML 0.41ß2. THIS IS ONLY AN UPGRADE. IF YOU DO NOT HAVE VERSION 0.40 ALREADY INSTALLED, YOU WILL NEED TO DOWNLOAD ANS INSTALL THAT VERSION FIRST, AND THEN COPY THIS UPGRADE OVER TOP OF IT.
This software requires RISC OS running on the ARM chipset If your computer is different, don't bother downloading this software!

OvHTML v0.40 download
ovh040.zip (451K)	Version 0.40 2003/10/14	Standard version of OvHTML 0.40, with all documentation. The examples are not supplied, download the archive below if you would like the example documents.
This software requires RISC OS running on the ARM chipset If your computer is different, don't bother downloading this software!

OvHTML examples download
ovhex.zip	2003/08/16	Standard example documents to show various features of OvHTML, including how it handles bad input...
This software requires RISC OS running on the ARM chipset If your computer is different, don't bother downloading this software!