On your posted drafts of Go and Big Fish, you have a different font on the cover page for the title of the script. Since you have made it widely known that you use Final Draft, I assume that you used the “export to PDF” feature in Final Draft to do this. When I try to export using a font other than a standard font for the title (e.g. Courier, Courier New, Times New Roman, Arial, etc.), it saves that particular font as Arial or Times New Roman. How do you go about having those different fonts on the PDF versions of your scripts?
–John Herzog
Gotha, FL
The problem is specific to Final Draft for Windows. On Mac OS X, any program can export to .pdf from the Print dialog box, so What You See really is What You Get. It’s absurdly easy. All of the .pdf’s I make are done that way, rather than with Final Draft’s export command.
Obviously, I don’t know Windows as well as I know the Macintosh, but here are some possible solutions:
- Adobe Acrobat. Making .pdf’s is its job. But it’s not cheap.
- Find a third-party utility for making .pdf’s. Any good Windows shareware/demoware site should have something. Hopefully someone will suggest one in the comments.
- Find a (free?) utility for combining .pdf’s. On the Mac, a good free one is Combine PDFs; Window should have something like it. Generate a cover page in some other program that lets you save .pdfs, then use the combining utility to smack it onto the first page of your screenplay .pdf.
Of course, option four would be to get a Mac. But that’s probably overkill for this situation.