What a Slugline Is Made Of

A slugline usually carries three pieces of information on one line: whether the scene is interior or exterior, the location, and the time of day. The difficulty is that those three ideas do not have one universal literal form. INT., INTERIOR, and a Chinese term such as “内景” can serve the same semantic role while having different lengths, punctuation, and separators. For the values that end up in the fields, semantic equivalence is not literal equivalence.

What is relatively stable in a slugline is where information tends to sit, not one mandatory vocabulary.

The three parts are usually positional

A common shape puts interior/exterior at the beginning, location in the middle, and time of day at the end. INT. OFFICE - DAY can therefore be read as three segments. A Chinese heading may use a form such as 内景 控制室 - 日. English headings may also spell out INTERIOR or EXTERIOR rather than use abbreviations.

A person can understand those forms as equivalent in purpose, but the literal strings are not the same. INT. is short, INTERIOR is longer, a Chinese term does not use the same punctuation, and the boundary before time of day may be written with different dash characters or a colon. Once the literal shape changes, the fields that get filled in may change with it.

When a script is imported, SlateX keeps the original scene-heading text and separately tries to fill in interior/exterior and time of day. Writing a heading back into a script file re-composes it, so a round trip is not guaranteed to be character-identical. The original line and the filled-in fields are therefore different things; filling fields does not mean the original line has been rewritten into a normalized form.

Why a fixed vocabulary is not enough

A slugline is human-authored free text. A fixed list of interior/exterior or time-of-day terms will encounter abbreviations, full words, other languages, combined forms, and production-specific habits that were not on the list.

SlateX does not use a keyword whitelist. It looks only at the visible shape of the line: where the separators fall and whether the opening run of characters can be recognised. It does not first prove that a word is a valid scene-heading term, so an unfamiliar form may leave the two fields for you to correct.

That is why 内景 控制室 - 日 and 内景：控制室 - 日 can produce different results: the second attaches the opening term with a full-width colon instead of a space. A full-word heading such as EXTERIOR. OFFICE - DAY may also fail to fill the expected fields. These are differences in the characters themselves, not evidence that one language is inherently handled better than another.

A different separator can change the split

Characters that look like a dash can be a plain hyphen -, an em dash —, or a full-width －. A colon may also be attached directly to the opening term. Readers can interpret these as similar visual separators, but string rules do not automatically treat them as interchangeable.

Only a limited set of forms is recognised. A plain hyphen may work where an em dash or a full-width dash does not. A prefix after a space may work where a full-width colon attached to the opening term does not. Do not assume the two fields will fill correctly for an unfamiliar form.

“This looks like the same kind of slugline” is a human judgment; the app only sees the characters actually written.

Three extracted parts are not proof of three valid values

This is the hard boundary. SlateX can fill interior/exterior, location, and time of day from one line, but producing values does not prove that those values are valid terms. A number placed before the heading is stripped before the interior/exterior marker is looked for, so it does not become that prefix. A hyphen inside a location can still cause a trailing piece to be treated like time of day.

The filled-in fields should therefore be treated as an editing starting point. Interior/exterior and time of day need human correction when the split does not match the script, and the script supervisor should verify them against the original heading. Presets can make repeated entry practical, but the existence of a preset does not validate a particular split.

The useful check is not simply “did the app fill three fields?” Ask instead whether the opening segment is really the interior/exterior designation, whether the middle still contains the complete location, and whether the trailing segment is actually time of day. When any of those disagree with the script, the script and human review remain the reference.

For how different languages write the interior/exterior part, see “How Int./Ext. Is Guessed from Slugline Delimiters”.

FAQ

Are INT., INTERIOR, and “内景” the same thing?

They can serve the same semantic role in a slugline, but they are not the same literal string. The app fills these two fields from the visible shape of the line, so character count, punctuation, and spacing can change the result; these forms cannot be treated as one identical template.

Why not put every slugline term into a fixed dictionary?

Sluglines are free text. Abbreviations, full words, other languages, combined forms, and production-specific habits keep creating forms that a fixed vocabulary can miss. SlateX currently reads the visible shape of the line rather than a keyword whitelist.

Why can an em dash or full-width dash change the result?

-, —, and － are different characters. A reader may see them as equivalent visual separators, but the app does not necessarily treat the other forms as the same separator.

If the app splits out interior/exterior and time of day, are those values verified?

No. Filling the fields only means the line was recognised as some form; it does not prove that the values are correct for that script. The script supervisor still needs to compare the result with the original slugline and correct it when necessary.

Axiom One LLC — SlateX