RecapCode is a special way of marking up your recap to indicate to the editor how you want the finished recap to appear when it's posted on the Agony Booth. It allows you to specify how text is formatted, but more importantly, it lets you insert hyperlinks, screen captures, "quotable" sections, a cast of characters, and much more into the recap.

If you're not familiar with RecapCode, please check out this introductory article.

Basic Tags

[recap]

This is a fundamental tag that will give me basic information about your recap. You must include this section in order to tell me the title of the movie, the year of release, how you want to be identified on the byline, your "In a nutshell" summary, the list of cast members, etc.

Nothing in this section will be visually rendered on the page. This is general information that will be used to insert your recap into the Agony Booth recap database. It must be included at the very top of the recap.

For a movie recap, the [recap] block should look something like this:

For a TV recap, the [recap] block should look like this:

Everything should be pretty self-explanatory. Make sure you have widescreen="yes" for widescreen movies and TV episodes, and widescreen="no" for movies and TV shows presented in the full frame aspect ratio. This controls the size of the screencap images in your recap.

[b], [i], [u]

Use these tags to format your text in bold, italics, and underline, respectively:

[b]some text[/b] will output some text

[i]some text[/i] will output some text

[u]some text[/u] will output some text

[url]

Use this tag to create hyperlinks. Do not use the [url] tag to create hyperlinks to other pages on the Agony Booth, or to link to Amazon products. There are separate [ablink], [agonizer], [offender], and [amazon] tags for these purposes, which are described below.

This:

Will output this text as a link to Wikipedia.

[summary]

This is primarily used for recaps that are too short to warrant a Cast of Characters section. It's mostly used for recaps of short films (less than one hour) and TV episodes.

Here's a sample of how the [summary] tag is used (from one of Ed's upcoming recaps).

And here's how the text above will look once it's converted to HTML:

[quotable]

When quoting passages of dialogue directly from the movie, put them in a [quotable] section to set them off from the recap.

Within [quotable] sections, please follow these rules:

1. Character names should be in bold ([b] tags) and followed by a colon.


2. Stage directions included in the dialogue should be inside square brackets and italicized (with [i] tags).

Here's a sample of how the [quotable] tag is used (from one of Scooter's recaps):

And here's how the text above will look once it's converted to HTML:

Intermediate Tags

[screencap]

Use this tag to insert screen captures into your recap.

(This document assumes that you already know how to grab the actual screen captures from the movie and store them as image files. If not, don't fret: There will eventually be a separate guide on how to do this.)

Screen captures should always be inserted between paragraphs.

99% of the time, the [screencap] tag will follow this format:

The above text will display the following when converted to HTML:

Caption goes here.

NOTE: This example shows the output for widescreen films. Full screen films will show the screencap floating on the right side of the page. For information on how the parser knows if the movie is widescreen or full screen, see the [recap] tag above.

filename000.jpg should be the unique name of the screen capture image file. You don't have to worry about including a folder name or a path along with the image. The RecapCode parser will automatically handle adding the path to the image.

(Note that images must be submitted as individual files. Do not embed images in a Word document.)

YourName should be the name of the person who wrote the caption. This will almost always be your first name. This provides the name for the "Caption contributed by" hover tooltip and allows for editors to include their own screen captures later.

If you have an image that's a different size from your other screencaps, you can specify an exact height and/or width inside the tag:

Caption goes here.

[cast]

Use this tag together with the [char] tag to generate the Cast of Characters at the top of the recap. This should only be used for recaps that are lengthy enough to warrant a cast listing. Short films (less than an hour) and TV episodes should have a [summary] tag instead.

Also, if you use the [cast] tag, make sure it comes before all other text in the recap (other than the required [recap] tag, of course).

The layout of the [cast] tag generally looks like this (this is part of the cast from Amanda's recap of The Skydivers):

The [cast] tag above will generate the following output:

The Cast of Characters:
	Beth Rowe (Kevin Casey). Runs a sport parachuting business with her husband. An extremely hard worker and the only likable female to ever inhabit a Coleman Francis movie. Naturally, she manages to get scarred for life by the end of the film.
	Harry Rowe (Tony Cardoza). Beth's business partner, and philandering husband. A pilot and a skydiver, though how a man this bland could crave any type of excitement is beyond me.

[ablink]

This tag is used to link to another Agony Booth recap, and highlight specific text in the recap. Mainly, you use this when you want to allude to another movie featured on the site, but you don't want the casual reader to be completely lost. It's also a good way to promote other recaps on the site.

You'll need to use the folder name to link to the other recap. To find out the folder name, go to the first page of the recap. Delete "http://www.agonybooth.com/" from the URL. Delete the last slash from the URL. What you'll have left is the folder name.

For example, let's say you want to highlight the phrase "the old Vomit Comet" on page 6 of the Starflight One recap. The URL for the recap is http://www.agonybooth.com/starflight_1/, so the folder name is starflight_1. So you would put this tag into your recap:

This will output the following:

You can click on the link above and see that it does take you to page 6 of the Starflight One recap, and highlights the appropriate text.

Things to keep in mind:

• The phrase you want to highlight may appear multiple times on the page. In this case, all uses of the phrase will get highlighted, which will look a little strange. If possible, try to highlight phrases that are only used once on a page.
• To get the phrase you want to highlight, be sure to do a View Page Source and copy the exact HTML you want to link to. This is because the highlighting code includes HTML formatting when searching for the phrase to highlight.
• Some of the older recaps have hard line breaks in the HTML. These line breaks aren't visible when reading the recap, but if the phrase you want to highlight has a hard line break in the middle of its HTML source, highlighting won't work for that phrase. You'll have to find another phrase to highlight.

[offender]

Use this tag to link to the Repeat Offender profile for any offender in your recap. Here's an example from the Casino Royale recap, retrofitted with RecapCode:

This will generate the following HTML:

As you can see, that link jumps directly to Kwouk's Repeat Offender profile. The link is based on the offender's first and last name, so please make sure you spell them correctly in the [offender] tag.

[amazon]

This tag is crucial: The more Amazon links you can add to your recaps, the more Amazon referrals the site generates, and the more referral fees there are to offset the cost of running the website.

To link to an Amazon product, you will need to know the ASIN for the product. ASIN stands for Amazon Standard Identification Number, and it's listed on every Amazon product page, in the Product Details section.

Here's an example, which you can see by going to the Amazon product page for the DVD of The Valley of the Dolls:

Sample of where to find an ASIN on an Amazon product page.

Note: For books, this will be labeled ISBN-10. For the time being, please do not use the ISBN-13 number.

Copy this number and use it in an [amazon] tag like so:

The above text will generate the following output:

Tip: Whenever possible, try to come up with non-obvious link text. Everybody knows a link on "Star Trek V: The Final Frontier" will most likely lead to the Amazon page for the DVD of that movie, so most people won't click on it. Try to come up with link text where it's not immediately obvious where the link goes. The more curious a reader is, the more likely they are to click the link.

[agonizer]

Use this tag to link to Agonizer articles. Unfortunately, there is no highlighting functionality in the Agonizer, though that may change in the near future. For now, you can only link to Agonizer articles. To do this, you need the article id, which is everything in the URL after "Id=".

Say you want to link to the Agonizer review of Michael Jackson's Ghosts. The URL to the review is http://www.agonybooth.com/agonizer/article.asp?Id=michael-jacksons-ghosts

So the [agonizer] tag would look like this:

And this is how it gets converted to HTML:

[nlist], [blist], [item]

Use these tags to create numbered and bulleted lists.

[nlist] stands for numbered list.
[blist] stands for bulleted list (bet you thought it stood for Hasselhoff-level celebrities, didn't you?).

Every bullet item within the list should be surrounded by [item] tags.

Here's a sample of how the [nlist] tag is used (this is part of the Casino Royale recap retrofitted with RecapCode):

And here's how the text above will look once it's converted to HTML:

The [blist] version of this is identical, except there are bullets instead of numbers, like so:

Advanced Tags

[br]

This tag will insert a line break into the text. Most likely you will never use this, because the RecapCode parser takes care of adding all the line breaks. Note: This tag does not need a closing tag.

[tm]

This will insert the trademark symbol (™) into your recap. Ideal for subtly mocking tired movie tropes! Note: This tag does not need a closing tag.

[youtube]

Use this tag if you want to insert a YouTube video directly into the recap. I would recommend only inserting your own videos. If you link to an unknown third party's video, there's a chance the video may get removed by the user.

To insert a YouTube video, you need to know the id of the video. In the URL to the video, the id is everything after "v=". So, to embed the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_M3IioCClIU, you have to put the following tag into your recap:

This will convert to the following:

[newcomments]

This tag is primarily used when updating or revisiting an older recap. If you're not updating a recap that was posted on the site years ago, you don't need to use this tag.

Put this tag around any new comments to make it obvious that the comments were not part of the original recap. This will put your comments in a box similar to the [summary] tag, but with a different background color.

Here's an example from one of Ed's recaps:

This results in the following:

[page]

This tag will create a page break in the recap. In the finished recap, a page break is where the "Continue to the next page" link shows up.

In general, you don't have to worry about inserting these. The RecapCode parser automatically inserts [page] tags every 3,000 words. However, if you really want your page breaks to occur at specific points in the recap, feel free to use this tag yourself.

Note: This tag does not need a closing tag.

Issues with square brackets and double quotes:

If you include, for example, "[quote]" in your recap, it will automatically be converted to HTML. If you want the actual string "[quote]" to show up for the reader, put the word "quote" in curly brackets.

Also, attributes are delimited by double quotes. If you want to use a double quote inside of an attribute, what to do?

For instance, this [char] tag features a nickname for the character. But the quotes inside of quotes will cause a parsing error:

To add an attribute like this, you will have to escape the quotes with a backslash (\), like so: