Converting prose to VN?

[Destiny-Smasher]

So I've been working on the story for my visual novel for two years now. It's finally finished, in prose form (I was posting each chapter of it online as I went so I could get feedback and share the story with those who just want to read).

Now that the story -- or should I say, the draft script -- is finished, I'm wanting to adapt it to visual novel format.

Since it's written in prose form currently, I'm wondering if there are any efficient ways to go about this to help save time. So far, I've just been individually formatting every single line of prose and coding it to fit the format of Renpy, but I figure there must be some shortcuts I've just not thought about. I tried to run a search on the forums here but I can't seem to find anything (then again, the website seems to break when I try to run a search, so).

Even just being able to add a " at the start and end of every line that doesn't already have them could be very useful.

Any guidance is greatly appreciated!

[Remix]

Without seeing the actual form of the prose it is difficult to actually forward many ideas...

You could actually set the standard lexer to ignore quotations by the way, which would allow:
char_name this is a sentence spoken by Alice's friend "Eileen" which would display fine
interpreted the same as the normal:
char_name "this is a sentence spoken by Alice's friend \"Eileen\" which would display fine"

No idea if that helps though

[philat]

Yeah, hard to say for certain without knowing what you need specifically. That said, adding quotes to each line should be just a matter of find/replace using line breaks. In MS Word by default, for instance, you'd search for ^p or ^l to find linebreaks and add quotes before/after. You can adjust for doubled quotes by finding "" and replacing with ", and fix other errors. Maybe not 100%, but faster than doing it by hand still. Sublime uses /n for line breaks in regex mode. I don't use other software, but there should be similar tricks for most feature-robust ones.