John August

Fountain

Switching from Final Draft to Highland

Apps, Fountain, Highland, Screenwriting Software

The Other Sam Cooke writes about switching from Final Draft to Highland:

After about 10 months of using the application, I can honestly say that Highland is not merely an affordable screenwriting application; it’s actually my favorite screenwriting application.

Cooke likes that he can write on the go using any plain-text editor (he prefers Editorial). When he’s back on his Mac, Highland stays out of his way and lets him focus on the words:

Most screenwriting apps, like Final Draft, have you build a document that looks like [the finished version] as you go along. So I constantly have to hit Tab a certain number of times, or Enter a certain number of times, or type in a little shortcut throughout the writing process to get my script to look like that, and because it requires such constant attention, I find myself devoting too much thought to the formatting of my document.

It’s not particularly difficult to learn Final Draft, and I imagine plenty of people don’t find it as distracting as I do, but I feel like formatting should be an after-the-fact concern. I don’t want to have to think about it while I’m creating.

One other advantage Cooke cites: Final Draft is $250, while Highland is $30 on the Mac App Store.

Screenplays on the Kindle, 2015 edition

Follow Up, Formatting, Fountain, Geek Alert, Highland, How-To, Weekend Read

A screenwriter friend just emailed me to ask how she could get one of her scripts to look good on the Kindle. She had Googled and discovered I’d written about reading screenplays on the Kindle twice back in 2009. (I was an early Kindle adopter.)

Back in 2009, I found there to be a lot of potential for reading screenplays on the Kindle, but a lot of frustration.

Six years later, what’s changed?

Nothing. Kindles and screenplays are still a bad fit.

Attempting to get screenplays to look screenplay-like on Kindle is a fool’s errand, so let me actively dissuade you from trying. Down this path lies futility and despair.

It’s not the Kindle’s fault.

Kindles are designed for free-flowing text like books. They don’t know anything about how screenplays work, and they will fight you at every step. We know. We tried. That’s a large part of why we made Weekend Read.

If you’re starting with a PDF, the closest you can probably come on the Kindle is to run the script through Highland and save it as a Fountain file. That’s just plain text, so if you then import it into Kindle’s parser, you’ll get a rough approximation, with everything set on the left margin:

INT. HOUSE – DAY
Mary and Tom carry in groceries.
TOM
They oughta call it, “Whole Paychec—
— THWACK! Tom is impaled by a spear.
CUT TO:

I write in Fountain, so this looks fine to me. But that’s not what my friend was looking for. She wanted something like a printed screenplay, and you’re just not going to get that on the Kindle.

But you can get closer. If you dig into the text file and carefully set tags for character names and transitions, you can have them centered or moved to the right margin. Or you can bail on the screenplay formatting. Dave Trottier has instructions you can follow to make something that looks more like a published stage play. It’s incredibly tedious, but it’s possible.

With a lot of work, you can make something that looks okay — but only okay. That’s the best you’re going to get, and it’s not worth the effort. So in 2015, I use my Kindle for books and my iOS devices for screenplays. Each is the right tool for the job.

Highland is great for novels

Apps, Fountain, Highland, Writing Process

macbook with highland

In addition to being a swell time to grow a mustache, November is NaNoWriMo — National Novel Writing Month.

Over the next few weeks, aspiring Hemingways and Flynns will attempt to hit their target word counts so that by Thanksgiving they’re finishing a draft. Godspeed to them all.

While novels can be written in just about any word processor, more-sophisticated apps like Scrivener allow for notes and images and virtual corkboards. In my experience, the more bells and whistles an app has, the more time I spend playing with the bells and whistles, and the less time I spend actually writing. That’s partly why I made Highland, a writing app that lets you focus on the words, not the formatting.

Because I’m mostly a screenwriter, Highland is largely tailored towards screenplays. But I also write fiction, and I didn’t want to give up any of my Highland comforts.

Since version 1.4, Highland has included a manuscript mode that strikes a good balance between helpful and distracting. Choosing Format > Document Format > Manuscript adds a single line to your file…

Format: Manuscript

…and with it, makes Highland a surprisingly good choice for writing fiction. When you print or export, you’ll find Highland double-spaces text to common publisher standards, perfect for paper editing.

For an example, compare an original file to the pdf Highland creates.

Highland 1.8.2, new in the Mac App Store today, adds a few extra features novel writers can appreciate, such as on-the-fly word count. (Just click the page icon.)

Want to put a header on every page? Add it below the format line:

Format: Manuscript

Header: MOBY-DICK ORIGINS / Caswell Barthowly

Want to start a new chapter? Use a hashtag, such as

#Chapter Six: The Wailing Whaling

Highland will automatically insert the page break, and center the chapter heading on the next page.1

Highland’s notes, synopses and omissions work the same as always. [[Text in double brackets]] won’t print. Same for a single line preceded by the equal sign =. And you can keep your scraps handy; select a range of text and choose Format > Omit. You’ll leave it in the file while hiding it from export.

In Preferences, you can adjust column width and line spacing, and set your favorite colors for Dark Mode.

If you’re tempted to give Highland a shot for writing your November novel, we have it marked half-off through November 7th. Give Manuscript mode a spin, and see whether its minimalism can maximize your page count.

As always, you can find Highland on the Mac App Store.

  1. Fountain purists are likely scratching their heads at this choice. Truth is, this untitled manuscript format is actually more like Markdown than Fountain. It feels correct for section headers to be printed. ↩

Luck, sequels and bus money

Episode - 162

Go to Archive

Adaptation, Film Industry, Follow Up, Fountain, QandA, Scriptnotes, Transcribed, WGA

This week, Craig and John tackle listener questions.

Why do some giant books get crammed into a single movie, while others get split into multiple films? How do you write a movie if you can’t even get your computer fixed? What should a screenwriter do if, after nine years of trying, he still can’t catch a break?

We don’t always have simple answers, but at least we have t-shirts. The new batch is available for pre-order starting today, so don’t wait.

If you’re in Los Angeles, the only chance to see us live this fall is at the Slate Culture Gabfest on October 8th. Check the link for tickets below.

Links:

You can download the episode here: AAC | mp3.

UPDATE 9-19-14: The transcript of this episode can be found here.