John August

Highland

Highland adds Quick Look previews

Apps, Highland

Speaking of Highland, my favorite new feature in the [Highland beta](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland) is Quick Look previews.

Do you ever find yourself staring at a folder of scripts, confused which draft is which? You open the files one at a time, skimming through them to find what you’re looking for.

Stop. Just select a file and press the spacebar. Up pops a preview of the script.

highland quick look

You can even up-arrow and down-arrow through all the files in the folder.

“Well sure,” you say. “That works great for your fancy new Fountain files, but who has folders full of those?”

Here’s the thing: Highland’s previews **even work with Final Draft (.fdx) files.**

final draft quick look

For whatever reason, Final Draft itself doesn’t support Quick Look. Highland does. So now you can Quick Look those files.

It works even if Highland isn’t running. Even if Final Draft isn’t installed. It’s just an extra little bonus because you deserve nice things.

Fountain, 10x faster

Geek Alert, Highland, Screenwriting Software

We’re keeping Nima Yousefi busy working on Highland, but he’s found time to push a major update to [Fountain](http://fountain.io/), the open-source format and code library that [makes the magic possible](http://nimayousefi.com/2012/06/fountain-update/):

> It came to our attention that on iOS devices the parser’s performance was less than stellar. In fact, it was pretty terrible.

> Long story short, now there’s FastFountainParser. It’s a traditional line-by-line parser and roughly ten times faster than the old one. So, that’s a win.

What this means for screenwriters: Fountain-based screenwriting apps for the Mac and iPad will be much, much faster.

Also included in the package: our libraries for HTML export and pagination.

> It splits large dialogue blocks up across pages, adding the appropriate MORE and CONT’D, and is smart enough not to split in the middle of a sentence.

Fountain is designed to be completely agnostic — you can write Fountain in almost any app that generates text. That said, specialized apps can do amazing things, and we want developers to have a consistent base to jump off from.

I’ve had the chance to try out some of the forthcoming apps. You’re going to love them.

Highland update fixes .fdx, adds Snow Leopard support

Apps, Highland, News

highland logoThe new beta of [Highland](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland/) — released last night — tackles three major issues.

The first fix is exporting to Final Draft (.fdx). If you encountered a file that opened as bunch of (cont’d)’s, give it another try.

The second major addition: legacy support for Snow Leopard (OS 10.6). In order to make it work, we had to temporarily disable two features: printing and the quick-reference sheet. They’ll be back. We just wanted to get the beta into testers’ hands ASAP.

The third issue is extended Unicode support for larger character sets, including accents and diacritical marks. We want Highland to work on screenplays written in a range of languages, but our sample size is small. So as with any issue, if you find Highland is struggling with a given script, please send a report card.

If you already have the Highland beta installed, it will auto-update. If not, you can [download it from the site](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland/).