stage.cls is a collection of LaTeX macros for writing stage plays.

Here's what I had to say about it at its original home on sciencedrive.com:

When I'm writing, I like to use LaTeX. It's a set of macros for TeX, Professor Knuth's superlative document preparation system. It's essentially a typesetting language.

The major problem with both TeX and LaTeX, at least for my purposes, is that they were originally designed to make typesetting complex mathematical formulas...well, not easy, but at least pretty. You can find a good history of TeX somewhere other than here. As you can imagine, though, a tool for scientific and mathematical use really isn't set up out of the box for more literary approaches, although you can of course write non-technical material with it.

Still, LaTeX is fine for fiction. It's customizable enough that you can get something that looks good on the page without too much additional effort.

LaTeX is horrible for screenplays and stage plays. Adrian McCarthy's ScriptTeX is an excellent resource for screenplay writing, but I've got two problems with it: 1) It uses plain TeX; and 2) Its stage play mode isn't correct. That said, if I were to write a screenplay, I'd probably use ScriptTeX rather than write my own. Adrian took care of a lot of hairy stuff that I barely understand. ScriptTeX is great for screenplays.

The second problem is the worst one, at least for me. ScriptTeX's stage play mode is designed to produce a manuscript that looks like something you would buy in a store, which is fine as far as it goes, but it doesn't produce correct manuscript format for submission and production. Since I'm focusing most of my effort towards playwriting at the moment, I needed a set of LaTeX macros that would produce a correctly-formatted manuscript.

Such a thing was nowhere to be found. So, since I was looking for a way to avoid writing actual material anyway, I decided to write my own set of LaTeX macros to produce stage plays in correct manuscript format. It took a while, and the results are still a little dodgy, but it does exactly what I need it to do.

Download stage.cls (approximately 55K tgz)

To use it, either "gzip -d stage.tgz | tar xvf -" on a Unix or Linux command line (or "tar xvzf stage.tgz" if you're using GNU tar), or use WinZip to decompress. Then install it like you'd install any other LaTeX .cls file. (That's a temporary cop-out while I write actual installation instructions, but on a Mac you'd probably put it in ~/Library/texmf/tex.)

Documentation is included on a PDF file in the package. You can also download it separately (approximately 100K PDF).

stage.cls is now distributed under the terms of the LaTeX Project Public License. I've uploaded it to CTAN as well. In uploading, I noticed that there are three other packages that are similar to mine. It's all about choice.

Last Updated 08/19/2007