Highland, our award-winning screenwriting app for the Mac, has a major update available in the Mac App Store.
While Highland looks largely the same on the surface, we’ve rebuilt quite a bit under the hood and added features for screenwriters who want to use Highland for all their daily writing.
Highland 1.7 — already updated to 1.7.1 — offers:
Better pagination, particularly with dialogue. Unlike a certain company, we don’t regard our pagination as the One True Way. But our pagination is now pretty damn great. I turned in a script last week written entirely in Highland. Without any tweaking, the pages flowed exactly how I wanted. No split sentences, no orphaned transitions.
Markers to help you find your way in long documents. I’ll often find myself scrolling back to look at something earlier in the script, then losing my place. So now I hit Control-M to leave a marker [[%]]. You can hop between markers with Control-Option-M. (If you’re used to markers from timeline-based apps for music or video, you’ll probably find this particularly natural.)
Improved stability and file-handling. Highland is much smarter (and less aggressive) about auto-saves, which were a leading cause of crashes. The version in the Mac App Store today (1.7.1) addresses launch issues some users were having with our revised code base.
Search via integrated Find bar. Faster, and one less window to close. If you have’t tried Find Again (⌘G), give it a shot. It’s always ready to search for the last thing you looked for.
Better syntax highlighting. By making it really clear what prints and what doesn’t, you can focus on your words, not the syntax.
Much faster PDF parsing. Highland 1.7 is better at both melting and building PDFs.
We update Highland frequently, but 1.7 is a significant upgrade in actual functionality.
When people used to ask if someone could write a script in Highland, my answer was generally, “Well, you could. But that not really what it’s for.”
Now it is. Highland 1.7 is the first version I’ve used to write an entire script from outline to delivered draft, and I loved it. Highland is fast and lean and distraction-free.
So if you haven’t checked it out lately — or only use it as a converter — give it another look as a daily writing app.