John August

Screenwriting Software

Final Draft, software and people

Rant, Screenwriting Software

On a recent episode of Scriptnotes, Craig Mazin and I discussed Final Draft 9. Short version: while I was disappointed by the update, Craig went Full Umbrage, because well…Craig.

Craig hates Final Draft — the app, and some of the company’s business practices, but not the people themselves. He doesn’t know the people. In my experience, Craig doesn’t actually hate anyone (except maybe his college roommate). Craig has strong opinions but a friendly nature.

Today I got on the phone with two of the people who run Final Draft and learned that since the episode aired, their customer service reps have gotten abusive calls and emails from listeners apparently motivated by Craig’s tirade. According to Final Draft, some of what folks were saying was so alarming that people working there felt unsafe.

That’s never acceptable. Never.

As Craig [tweeted](https://twitter.com/clmazin/status/426479055244771328) [today](https://twitter.com/clmazin/status/426479379460263936):

> clmazin: Not liking software is one thing. Making threatening or harassing calls to human beings is entirely another. It’s not cool.

> clmazin: Please don’t treat fellow human beings (many of whom are just working an hourly gig) poorly because you don’t like the company or product.

The Final Draft folks have agreed to come on a future episode so we can talk about this incident, their app, and the state of screenwriting software. I’m excited to dig in and discuss.

But I didn’t want another day to go by without making it clear that Craig and I never mean to give cover to assholish behavior.

Final Draft’s Reformat dialog box

Screenwriting Software

Final Draft has long had a Reformat dialog box. I’ve long [hated it](http://johnaugust.com/2013/why-i-like-writing-in-fountain).

For Version 9, Final Draft made small revisions:
FD_reformat

Can you tell which is the old one and which is the new one?

Hint: In the new one, there’s no space between the bracketed letters.

Why I like writing in Fountain

Fountain, Highland, Screenwriting Software

For the past 18 months, I’ve been doing all my new writing in Fountain rather than a heavyweight screenwriting app like Final Draft or Movie Magic Screenwriter.

I love working in Fountain so much that I made a screencast to explain [why it’s better](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lElhyw3WGxo):

For geek types, it’s easy to say that Fountain is [like Markdown for screenplays](http://fountain.io/faq). But that doesn’t explain why it’s better for day-to-day writing, so in this screencast I tried to show why a screenwriter might use a Fountain-based app instead of Final Draft or one of the other apps from the 1990s.

In the video, you’ll see that I’m including several comparatively new applications in this category of old-style apps. They may be recent, but programs like Fade In and Adobe Story work largely same way word processors did back when Will Smith was the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. They’re essentially Microsoft Word with custom style sheets. They don’t take advantage of how much faster computers have gotten, or the special things you can do when you’re handling structured text like screenplays.

The old apps were built for printing scripts from stand-alone computers. The new apps are built for the web, for phones and tablets, for everything that’s coming. It’s the flexibility and extensibility of Fountain that helps make new things possible.

As always, you can find out more info about Fountain at [Fountain.io](http://fountain.io.), including full explanation of the syntax and apps that have particularly good support for it.

You can get Highland, the app I used for this demo, from the [Mac App Store](http://highland.quoteunquoteapps.com/fountain-screencast).

Over this Thanksgiving break, why not give Fountain a try?

PDF to FDX

Follow Up, Screenwriting Software

In an [earlier post](http://johnaugust.com/2013/how-to-convert-a-pdf-to-final-draft), I listed three ways to import a PDF into Final Draft:

1. Retype it.
2. Copy and Paste and Reformat every line.
3. Use Highland.

On a Mac, Highland was by far the best choice. It was much faster and much more accurate.

Joel Levin at Final Draft emailed me to recommend an alternate workflow that’s listed on the [Final Draft site](http://kb.finaldraft.com/article.aspx?cid=1001&aid=519):

> If you have a recent version of the Adobe Acrobat Reader you can go to File > Save As > Text and save the document as a text file.

> Import this text file into Final Draft (File > Open) as a script but you may need to do some reformatting.

I just tried it, and will update my earlier post. Here’s a screencast:

The short version is that for the file I tested, this method was better than copy-and-paste — but only slightly. Elements were more likely to be recognized correctly, but line breaks and spacing glitches were daunting. The script also swelled from 114 to 343 pages.

I wondered if it was just something strange about that one file, so I tried the same method on a bunch of the PDFs in the [Library](http://johnaugust.com/library). Some of them turned out better than others, but all of them were significantly messed up.

So while it’s generally an improvement over copy-and-paste, you’d still need to spend quite a bit of time getting a useful script out of this workflow.

This actually isn’t Final Draft’s fault — their app is doing a commendable job on the fairly janky text file Adobe Reader is creating.

Nor is it Adobe’s fault — they built a general-purpose PDF app that doesn’t know anything about screenplays. It’s like complaining that a hammer is a terrible screwdriver.

Highland is a specialized tool for doing exactly this kind of conversion, which is why it works so much better. My previous recommendation still stands: if you need to convert a PDF to Final Draft, your best bet is to use [Highland](http://highland.quoteunquoteapps.com/screencast-pdf-fdx) on a Mac.

If you can’t use Highland (e.g. you’re on a PC, and can’t bribe someone with a Mac), this Final Draft workflow is better than copy-and-paste. My thanks to Joel for pointing this out.