General ⇒ How to write a dialogue ?

[jojva]

Hello,

I'm writing a Novella and I'm trying to use LaTeX, despite the difficulties it brings.
I would like to know how to write dialogs like :
"Hello !
- Hello, how are you ?
- I'm fine, thank you."

And it would be really great if you could show me where I can find examples of books written with LaTeX, before the compilation. I don't see a better way to learn faster the LaTeX.

My apologizes for my english, I'm french^^

Thanks !

[frabjous]

Could you be a little clearer about what you want help with? I don't understand how writing dialogue in a novella is any different than writing normal paragraphs.

Do you want dashes in front of every new paragraph inside the dialogue? That's certainly not standard in American English novels/novellas, and I haven't seen it in French either, but is that what you want?

[localghost]

If this dialogue shall really be printed like shown here, you could use an itemize environment modified by means of the enumitem package.

Code: Select all

\documentclass[11pt,a4paper,english]{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{babel}
\usepackage{enumitem}

\setitemize{
  fullwidth,
  label=-,
  leftmargin=*,
  nolistsep
}

\begin{document}
  \noindent "Hello
  \begin{itemize}
    \item Hello, how are you ?
    \item I'm fine, thank you."
  \end{itemize}
\end{document}

For details see the package manual. Regarding the planned layout I have the same concerns as frabjous.


Best regards and welcome to the board
Thorsten

[jojva]

Could you be a little clearer about what you want help with? I don't understand how writing dialogue in a novella is any different than writing normal paragraphs.

I mean, in latex when you hit Return once, it isn't considered :
LaTeX :

Code: Select all

"Hello !
-Hi !"

PDF after compilation :

Code: Select all

"Hello ! -Hi !"

Do you want dashes in front of every new paragraph inside the dialogue? That's certainly not standard in American English novels/novellas, and I haven't seen it in French either, but is that what you want?

I don't understand... In american as in french, a dialogue is structured with dashes, isn't it ?

In fact, I just want to be able to write (in the pdf) this :
"Bla bla, says someone
- Yes of course, says his friend
- Blo bleu then !"

[frabjous]

I don't understand... In american as in french, a dialogue is structured with dashes, isn't it ?

In fact, I just want to be able to write (in the pdf) this :
"Bla bla, says someone
- Yes of course, says his friend
- Blo bleu then !"

Dialogues are not structured with dashes in American English or even in British English novels, no.

In an English novel, we' have just have (with each line being a new paragraph, with each speaker's part inside its own quotation marks).

"Hello!"
"Hi."

In LaTeX, paragraph breaks are made with two linefeeds in the code, rather than one.

Code: Select all

"Hello!"

"Hi!"

But I gather from here that things are different in French, which is news to me. But it still isn't entirely clear to me how things tend to look in French. Is each paragraph indented? If a line of dialogue is more than one line long, how is the wrapping line indented>

In other words, does it look like:

Code: Select all

   "Bla bla, says someone
   - Yes of course
   - But then again we need to consider really 
long lines and here's a really long line which 
I'm using to ask about what happens when lines 
wrap. I don't really know.

Or

Code: Select all

   "Bla bla, says someone
   - Yes of course
   - But then again we need to consider really 
     long lines and here's a really long line which 
     I'm using to ask about what happens when lines 
     wrap. I don't really know.

Or is it something else?

I think Thorsten's advice would give you the latter. The former, I suppose could be done just with multiple lines and paragraphs that begin with dashes:

E.g., in the LaTeX:

Code: Select all

   "Bla bla, says someone

   - Yes of course

   - But then again we need to consider really 
long lines and here's a really long line which 
I'm using to ask about what happens when lines 
wrap. I don't really know.

Use - for hyphen (short dash), -- for a longer en-dash (–), and --- for an even longer em dash (—).

But I wonder if there is a French-specific LaTeX board where you could get advice about these from people used to the conventions.

[jojva]

Dialogues are not structured with dashes in American English or even in British English novels, no.

In an English novel, we' have just have (with each line being a new paragraph, with each speaker's part inside its own quotation marks).

"Hello!"
"Hi."

Ok so I learnt something too^^

But I gather from here that things are different in French, which is news to me. But it still isn't entirely clear to me how things tend to look in French. Is each paragraph indented? If a line of dialogue is more than one line long, how is the wrapping line indented>

It's exactly like that :

Code: Select all

  This is a narrative paragraph which is very long and I don't know what to say oh the 
dialogue is coming :) 
  "Bla bla, says someone
  - Yes of course
  - But then again we need to consider really long lines and here's a really long line 
which I'm using to ask about what happens when lines wrap. I don't really know."
  And this is another narrative paragraph.

Sometimes you don't even have the "", just the dashes.

I think Thorsten's advice would give you the latter. The former, I suppose could be done just with multiple lines and paragraphs that begin with dashes

OK I will try that, I just thought it was a little annoying to jump a line each time a character is talking. Nevermind...

But I wonder if there is a French-specific LaTeX board where you could get advice about these from people used to the conventions.

I've looked for this type of board but apparently french are not very talkative about latex. But maybe an english board about how to write books would help me^^

[nlct]

James Joyce used to start dialogue with a dash, but I think it's generally considered experimental.

You might want to look at csquotes or quotmark.

Although I wrote the quotmark package, these days I just define

Code: Select all

\newcommand{\tqt}[1]{\textquoteleft#1\textquoteright}
\newcommand{\itqt}[1]{\textquotedblleft#1\textquotedblright}

and then my dialogue will be something like:

Code: Select all

\tqt{He said \itqt{argh!} just before he died.}

\tqt{Where's the body?}

\tqt{In the study.}

(I sometimes have to convert to RTF using latex2rtf which is why I don't use quotmark anymore.)

Regards
Nicola Talbot

Regards
Nicola Talbot

[XMs]

If it's still important: for russian language babel have ‘"--*’ command — it's the same thing you're asking, like:
"--*replic1
"--*replic2
will be like
— replic1
— replic2
I think you'll find something simular for french

[cgnieder]

It's exactly like that :

Code: Select all

  This is a narrative paragraph which is very long and I don't know what to say oh the 
dialogue is coming :) 
  "Bla bla, says someone
  - Yes of course
  - But then again we need to consider really long lines and here's a really long line 
which I'm using to ask about what happens when lines wrap. I don't really know."
  And this is another narrative paragraph.

Sometimes you don't even have the "", just the dashes.

Seems like a simple task to me:

Code: Select all

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[french]{babel}
\begin{document}

This is a narrative paragraph which is very long and I don't know what to say oh the
dialogue is coming :)

>>Bla bla, says someone

-- Yes of course

-- But then again we need to consider really long lines and here's a really long line
which I'm using to ask about what happens when lines wrap. I don't really know."

And this is another narrative paragraph.

\end{document}

dialogue.png (26.62 KiB) Viewed 19976 times

Regards