A Brief Introduction
RecapCode is a special way of marking up your recap to indicate to a potential 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.
Once your recap is marked up with RecapCode, you submit it to the Agony Booth, and a site admin will then run your recap through a program called a parser, which will magically change it to fully-formatted Agony Booth HTML!
Why add RecapCode?
Up until now, there's been no set format for Agony Booth submissions. So each submission was in its own format. Images, quotable sections, cast of characters, etc, were all done according to the recapper's own style, putting the bulk of the work on the webmaster to get the recap into a suitable state for posting.
RecapCode ensures that formatting a recap and posting it to the site will be quick and painless for everyone. You can still submit a recap without RecapCode, but if you do, your recap will be considered half finished. And someone, most likely the webmaster, will be stuck with the task of finishing it. Therefore, we can't guarantee that half-finished recaps will be posted in a timely manner.
Basic Formatting in RecapCode
If you've ever used UBB Code or BB Code on a website forum (like, say, the Agony Booth Forum itself), you already have a good idea of how to use RecapCode. For the most part, you will have to surround text in your recap with tags, which are denoted by square brackets. These tags indicate how the text should be formatted. Like so:
[tag]the text you want to format[/tag]
So [b]some text[/b] will output some text
And [i]some text[/i] will output some text
And [u]some text[/u] will output some text
Pretty straightforward, right?
Slightly More Advanced Formatting in Recap Code
Here's where things get interesting. For some tags, you can specify extra information about how the text should be formatted. This information goes inside of the left side tag (AKA the opening tag), into what we call attributes:
[tag="default value" attribute1="value 1" attribute2="value 2"]text you want to format[/tag]
Let's take the [url] tag as an easy example.
So if you put [url="http://www.agonybooth.com"]some text[/url] in your recap, the finished recap will display some text as a link to the Agony Booth.
For a more complex example, here's a peek at the [screencap] tag (more about it later in this document):
[screencap="skydivers_468.jpg" by="Amanda"]"Our dad's bleeding you dry, isn't he, Mr. Cardoza?"[/screencap]
The above tag will eventually be converted to this:
Example of using the [screencap] tag. And yes, I do see the irony in taking a screencap of a screencap.
For a full explanation of the tags available in RecapCode, check out the Full Reference Guide to Recap Code!
RecapCode Quick Reference
[recap]
Contains general information about the movie/TV episode you're recapping.
For movies:
[recap widescreen="yes"]
[movie year="1997"]Batman & Robin[/movie]
[author="my-email@fakedomain.com"]Albert Walker[/author]
[stars]Arnold Schwarzenegger, George Clooney, Chris O'Donnell, Uma Thurman, Alicia Silverstone[/stars]
[nutshell]"I would say that the Batman movie franchise had been reduced to the level of the campy '60s Adam West TV series, but that would be an insult to Adam West."[/nutshell]
[/recap]
For TV episodes:
[recap widescreen="no"]
[series]Star Trek: The Next Generation[/series]
[episode airdate="12/12/1988"]The Outrageous Okona[/episode]
[author="my-email@fakedomain.com"]Albert Walker[/author]
[stars]Billy Campbell, Whoopi Goldberg, Joe Piscopo, Teri Hatcher[/stars]
[nutshell]"He's not just outrageous, he's [b]nutrageous![/b]"[/nutshell]
[/recap]
[b], [i], [u]
Simple text formatting: Bold, italic, and underline.
[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]
For linking to any page that isn't on the Agony Booth or Amazon.
[url="http://en.wikipedia.org/Recapping"]this text[/url]
[summary]
A brief summary of the recap, normally used for shorter recaps.
[summary]
The Enterprise crew goes up against a bunch of plastic surgery addicts and the Federation itself in an attempt to help a small colony of Amish aliens who have discovered a fountain of youth.
Elsewhere in the film, Data embarks on part 53 in a series of 78 explorations into what it means to be human. Today's segment: How to make friends with a kid while coming off like a robotic Michael Jackson.
[/summary]
[quotable]
A direct transcription of dialogue from the movie.
[quotable]
[b]Mike:[/b] Celeste, I think you're beautiful.
[b]Celeste:[/b] [[i]stops crying immediately[/i]] You do? [[i]Mike nods; a beat[/i]] You gonna kiss me now?
[b]Mike:[/b] [[i]recoiling a little[/i]] No.
[/quotable]
[screencap]
A screen capture (aka framegrab) of the movie/episode being recapped.
[screencap="filename000.jpg" by="YourName"]Caption goes here.[/screencap]
[cast]
Used for listing the major characters in the movie, along with a description and headshot image of each.
[cast]
[char="Beth Rowe" actor="Kevin Casey" image="cast_beth.jpg"]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.[/char]
[char="Harry Rowe" actor="Tony Cardoza" image="cast_harry.jpg"]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.[/char]
[/cast]
[ablink]
Used for linking to another recap, and highlighting specified text in that recap.
I feel like I'm riding on the [ablink="starflight_1" page="6" highlight="the old Vomit Comet"]Vomit Comet[/ablink] when I'm watching this movie.
[offender]
Used for linking to the Repeat Offenders page.
And the Chinese officer is, of course, [b]Repeat Offender[/b] [offender="Burt Kwouk"]Burt Kwouk[/offender], best known as Cato from the [i]Pink Panther[/i] series.
[amazon]
Used for linking to Amazon products. In the example below, B000EXDSCA is the product's ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number).
Celeste, for some reason, insists on Wilbur jumping first, so another henchman, who this time looks like David Birney circa [amazon="B000EXDSCA"][i]Valley of the Dolls[/i][/amazon], steps in to hold the wires back while Wilbur jumps.
[agonizer]
Used for linking to Agonizer mini-recaps and articles.
Data comes off creepier than [agonizer="michael-jacksons-ghosts"]Michael Jackson[/agonizer] in this scene.
[nlist], [blist], [item]
Creates a numbered list (nlist) or a bulleted list (blist).
Now, class, given this drainpipe scenario, which of the following outcomes is absolutely inevitable?
[nlist]
[item]Mimi calmly and expertly descends the drainpipe without incident.[/item]
[item]The drainpipe suddenly swings away from the building, causing Mimi to cling to it desperately as it careens wildly across a rear-projected landscape.[/item]
[item][ablink="superman_3/" page="3" highlight="Clark emerges from a nearby drainpipe"]Clark Kent[/ablink] emerges from the drainpipe with a dog he rescued.[/item]
[/nlist]
[br]
Creates a hard line break, where needed.
This tag creates[br]
a hard line break
[tm]
Creates a trademark symbol (™).
RecapCode[tm] is awesome!
[youtube]
Used for embedding YouTube videos directly into the recap.
[youtube="_M3IioCClIU"][i]Star Trek: TNG[/i] bloopers![/youtube]
[newcomments]
When updating older recaps, use this tag to add new comments.
[newcomments]
[b]2007 Comments:[/b] The following is an upgrade of my first recap for the site. I've upgraded the screen captures using the recent Ultimate Edition DVD, as well as including data gleaned from the new extras, the best of which is an audio commentary from Sir Roger Moore himself.
[/newcomments]
[page]
Allows you to manually insert a page break in the recap. For the most part, you should not have to do this, unless you're very particular about where your page breaks go.
Last paragraph of page 1.
[page]
First paragraph of page 2.
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.
Attributes, as shown above, are delimited by double quotes. If you need to include double quotes in an attribute, you must escape them with a backslash (\):
[char="Celeste \"Monkey\" Whitman" actor="Sally Field" image="cast_celeste.jpg"]...[/char]
For a full explanation of the tags available in RecapCode, check out the Full Reference Guide to Recap Code!
