John August

Apps

Highland ships

Apps, Fountain, Highland

highland iconHighland, our long-in-beta screenplay editor, is finally available in the [Mac App Store today](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/highland/id499329572?mt=12).

It’s regularly priced at $19.99, but through the end of the month, it’s half-off at $9.99.

In addition to letting you write scripts in plain text, Highland converts files between PDF, Final Draft (.fdx) and Fountain formats. It works in all directions.

Yes, all directions — you can give it a PDF of a screenplay and it will melt it down to an editable file. That seems like magic, but it’s actually just a lot of hard work, and a year’s worth of report cards submitted by beta testers.

Melting PDFs is a feat that no other screenwriting app even attempts, so we made a [little video about it](http://player.vimeo.com/video/59698758?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0&autoplay=0):

We’ll never be able to convert every PDF, which is one reason we offer a [free demo version](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland/) so you can see how it works before you buy it.

With Highland, you can also tackle FDX files without Final Draft. We’ve found our users are often writing in Google Docs or TextMate or vim — or on their iPads. Whatever setup you prefer, Highland can get you into and out of Final Draft smoothly when you need special features.

Highland is a great bridge between apps, but over the last year we’ve found more and more users are simply doing their writing in Highland. It’s a full-featured editor, with spelling, versions and find-and-replace. Because it’s plain text, you can focus on the words and not the formatting.

The biggest changes to Highland are easy to spot: a new icon, a new UI, and two new fonts. Courier Prime is an obvious addition, but we’ve also included Highland Sans, a brand-new editing typeface that’s sharp on the screen and easy on the eyes.

highland fontsOther additions include Dark Mode for late-night writing, fast pagination and Apple’s speech-to-text dictation.

And there are more cool things in the works. But today is a major milestone, because Highland was such a long time coming. I want to thank Ryan, Nima, Stuart and our amazing beta testers for their perseverence.

Check out more information, including a FAQ, at [Quote-Unquote Apps](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland/).

You can find Highland on the [Mac App Store](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/highland/id499329572?mt=12).

Writing comics in Fountain

Fountain

Fountain was originally designed as a screenplay format, but it actually works well for any text involving scenes and characters. Antony Johnston describes how he [uses it for comics](http://antonyjohnston.com/index.php/2013/03/06/fountainhead/):

> Turns out that, despite being designed for screenplay format, Fountain actually works pretty well for comics “out of the box” (note: there is no box) by using some of the built-in “forced format” syntax for underlines and emboldening.

To get you started, Johnston includes the templates he uses.

Fountain is flexible enough that you can also use it for stage plays and musicals. (We’re likely going to add a Lyrics element to the spec to help with the latter.) Ultimately, it’s up to individual apps to support specific templates, but the goal as always is to let writers create in any editor they love.

Outlining scripts in Fountain

Fountain, Highland

Stu Maschwitz offers an overview of [outlining in Fountain](http://prolost.com/foutline):

> Organization and structure are such an important issues that I made sure Fountain had some provision for supporting them. Fountain’s Sections are invisible, hierarchical markers that you can use to demarcate the structural points of your story—or anything else you like. Synopses allow you to annotate a Section — or a Scene Heading — with non-printing descriptive text.

> You can add Sections and Synopses to your Fountain screenplay as you work, or as a part of rewriting. You can also begin the writing process with them. You can use them to denote scenes, sequences, act breaks, or whatever is helpful to your writing process.

Because they don’t print in the formatted script, [section and synopsis tags](http://fountain.io/syntax#section-sections) can help you structure the document in a way that makes sense for you as you’re writing. Rather than just a scene header like…

EXT. BEACH – DAY

…you can throw a meaningful label on it like…

##Giant crabs attack campers

EXT. BEACH – DAY

When we were drafting up the Fountain spec, I honestly didn’t pay much attention to these tags, because I didn’t think I’d use either much. But in writing my ABC pilot, I found them genuinely useful.

I used the top-level section mark (#) to denote act breaks, and the synopsis tag (=) to quickly jot out what was happening in upcoming scenes. That’s great for the end of the day, when you’re leaving some gas in the tank for tomorrow’s writing.

The = can also serve as a quick-and-dirty to-do list, such as:

INT. BEDROOM – DAY

= shorter. start on Asha

Several of the existing Fountain apps — and many of the upcoming ones — can do magic things with section and synopsis tags, formatting them differently or collecting them for an outline view. Together, they make it easier to jump through your script. Rather than looking for a page number or a location, you can skip right to the section or note you want.

Introducing Courier Prime

Apps, News

Today, we’re introducing a new typeface designed for screenwriters. It’s called Courier Prime.

It’s Courier, just better:

courier chart

It’s free, and available at [Quote-Unquote Apps](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/courierprime/).

How we got here
—-

Novels were once written by hand. So were plays and poems and speeches. As readers, we don’t see the original scrawl because they’ve been typeset along the way, transformed into something easier to read.

Screenwriting began in the era of typewriters, and it’s always been served raw. What the screenwriter pulls out of the typewriter isn’t a manuscript to be sent to the publisher — it’s the final product.

Over the years, the tools have changed, with the advent of computers and printers and PDFs. But we still expect scripts to look like they came out of a typewriter.

Specifically, we want screenplays to be twelve-point Courier.

The Courier typeface was designed in 1955 by Howard “Bud” Kettler for IBM. It’s classified as a monospaced slab serif, with each character taking up the same space and constructed with even stroke widths. IBM deliberately chose not to seek any copyright, trademark, or design patent protection on Courier, which is why it’s royalty free. It was the standard typeface on IBM’s best-selling Selectric II typewriter, and soon became the default typeface in Hollywood.

By standardizing around one typeface set at a specific size, we can take advantage of some rules-of-thumb.

For example, one page of screenplay (roughly, sometimes) equals one minute of screen time. More importantly, producers can be assured that a 119-page draft really is shorter than a 140-page draft. Unlike college freshmen, screenwriters can’t fiddle with the font to change the page count.

The biggest problem with Courier is that it often reveals its low-res heritage. Designed for an era of steel hitting ribbon, Courier can look blobby, particularly at higher resolutions.

But it doesn’t have to.

It’s Courier, just better.
—–

In July 2012, I asked type designer Alan Dague-Greene to come up with a new typeface that matched the metrics of Courier — thus protecting line breaks and page counts — while addressing some of its weak spots.

I wanted a font that could be substituted letter-for-letter with Courier Final Draft, but look better, both on-screen and printed. I wanted a bolder bold and real italics, not just slanted glyphs.

Alan rose to the challenge, creating a typeface that is unmistakably Courier, but subtly improved in ways you wouldn’t necessarily notice at first. Here’s a primer.

abcde comparison

The serifs are crisper and less rounded. They’re also less blobby where the serif connects — particularly in the lower-case c.

Look at the spaces inside the b and d. They’ve been opened up slightly, and the surrounding stroke tapered.

Still, you might occasionally wonder if you’re looking at regular Courier or Courier Prime. The quickest giveaway is the lowercase y, which loses its “foot” in Courier Prime.

y comparison

We ultimately went through 25 builds for Courier Prime.

With each new version, I’d prepare three sample screenplay pages — the same text but in three different fonts (standard Mac Courier, Courier Final Draft, and Courier Prime). The samples were given codenames (e.g. Fish, Dog, Bird) then shown to Actual Screenwriters, who voted on their favorite, not knowing which was which.

The early results were Not Good.

Screenwriters consistently preferred standard Mac Courier to our custom face. But we soon realized why: the standard Mac Courier is fairly heavy. Screenplays have a lot of white space, which makes thin Couriers look even thinner. As we gradually nudged up the stroke weight, we found the Goldilocks spot which was just right.

I want to thank all the screenwriters who participated in both the voting and the beta tests, and of course Alan Dague-Greene and Ryan Nelson for all their work getting the typeface out the door.

Courier Prime is [available today](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/courierprime/), free, for Mac and Windows. It’s released under a very liberal license so developers can use it for iOS and Android apps. We hope screenwriters get a lot of use out of it.