Plotlines

Plotlines is a tool to help create online choice-based narratives.

Authors create a basic story structure in Inkscape. Plotlines will read the SVG file and generate templates for HTML5 output.

Works-in-progress can be saved in human-readable TOML files. This format is better suited to collaborative editing.

Workflow

Inkscape's Connectors tool makes it easy to design a branching narrative structure.

You can capture ideas in the title and description fields of both nodes and edges using the Object Properties editor.

When that phase is complete, you use Plotlines to save the structure as a .toml file where the serious process of writing and editing begins.

Finally, you can export to a template tree ready for Spiki to generate the HTML suitable for a static web site on the Internet.

Features

Plotlines can import SVG from either of these editors:

• Dunnart
• Inkscape

Usage

python3 -m plotlines.main --help
usage: python -m plotlines.main [-h] [--debug] [-i INPUT] [-o OUTPUT] [--ending ENDING] [--limit LIMIT] [--exits EXITS]

options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --debug               Display debug information
  -i, --input INPUT     Specify an input file
  -o, --output OUTPUT   Specify an output file or directory
  --ending ENDING       Set the number of endings [4].
  --limit LIMIT         Limit the number of Nodes and Edges in the graph [100]
  --exits EXITS         Fix the number of exiting Edges from each Node [4]