product photo Weekend Read has an update in the App Store today. Version 1.0.2 greatly improves PDF reading and adds a lot of new content. It’s free, so go get it.

As promised, this release tackles issues with screenplay PDFs originating in Celtx and Fade In, and has much better support for A4 paper sizes and international characters.

We also worked with The Black List (blcklst.com) to allow members to read watermarked scripts inside the app.

If you have script that didn’t look right under the old build, delete it and load it back into your library. There’s a good chance it will work now.

Ripping apart and reassembling PDFs is an imperfect art, so we’ll never be able to read every screenplay PDF.1 But this build gets us closer than ever. And because Weekend Read shares code with Highland, these improvements will carry over to the next build of our flagship Mac app, which should be out soon.

While bug fixes are great, I’m most excited about our new content.

Filling the shelves

A great reader needs great writing, so we rebuilt the For Your Consideration section in a way that lets us add new material — new scripts, new outlines, entire new categories — in real time. We’ll use this ability to feature both established screenwriters and folks you’ve never heard of. And because so much of the best writing is happening in television, we will regularly include pilots and series as Featured Shows.

  • Our first Featured Writer is Rian Johnson, who brings us his scripts for Brick, Looper and The Brothers Bloom.

  • Our first Featured Show is Hannibal, offering all the scripts from the first season, courtesy of show creator Bryan Fuller.

  • We’ve also included the transcripts for every episode of Scriptnotes.

Our plan is to add and replace content frequently, so if you find something you like, make sure to add it to your library so it doesn’t disappear on you.

One final note: As a developer, one downside to frequent app updates is that each new build hides the reviews from earlier users. So if you love Weekend Read, please consider leaving us a review, even if you already did for version 1.0.1.

Thanks, and enjoy the read.

  1. Some PDFs are nothing but images, while others use watermarks that deliberately prevent text-parsing. And some are odd for their own odd reasons, such as Asghar Farhadi’s script for The Past. It looks normal to the human eye, but under the hood it’s anything but. ↩