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Separating scenes in Highland

November 27, 2016 Apps, Fountain, Highland

Jose, one of our Highland 2 beta testers, wrote in with a feature request:

I’d love the ability to print individual scenes, with page breaks after each scene. It can be useful to physically rearrange scenes once printed.

We could add that as a command, but how often would users really want to do that? Rarely-used features are cruft. They make apps more complicated than they need to be, both for users and developers.

Luckily, it’s remarkably easy to do what Jose wants with any Fountain app, including the original Highland.

Step one: Think what it would look like

In Fountain syntax, a page break is simply three equal signs: ===

Meanwhile, scene headers start with either INT. or EXT.1

So in order to put a page break between each scene, you want to replace every instance of INT. with…

===
INT.

…and then do the same with EXT.

Step two: Make it look like that

Within Highland, you can do it with two passes of Find and Replace, choosing Replace All. It’s helpful to copy-and-paste the second part, since Mac’s default find and replace fields only show you a single line.

find-and-replace

It took less than 20 seconds in all.

If breaking scenes into individual pages is something you do all the time, it’s easily automated. Here’s an AppleScript to do it: Split Fountain Scenes.

As always, it’s a good idea to work on a copy of the file you can toss after printing.

Highland’s plain-text Fountain format makes little hacks like this easy. For example, another beta tester requested a way to print his [[inline notes]], which are removed by default.

There’s no need for him to wait for us to add a feature. We suggested he simply find-and-replace [[ and ]] with ++. He got the inline notes he wanted right away.

How would you do this in Final Draft or Fade In?

With difficulty. I couldn’t find a way to do it without manually inserting page breaks at the end of every scene. If you figure out a way, let me know.

  1. You can also force a scene header by starting with a period: .DEEPER IN THE VOID. You can find these by searching for a return followed by a period. ↩

Related Posts

  1. Find and Replace, a screenwriter’s best friends
  2. Highland 1.5 ships
  3. Highland updates

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