John August

Screenwriting Software

Final Draft update adds highlighting, quicker PDFs

Screenwriting Software

[Final Draft 8.01](http://www.finaldraft.com/support/software/final-draft-8.php) adds one thing I [really wanted](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2009/final-draft-8-briefly) — a highlighter right in the toolbar.

And for those frustrated by FD8 forcing you to create .pdfs through the Print dialog box, you can now make a .pdf right from the file menu. (Weirdly, the vestigial disabled Email menu item is still there.)

I’ve tested the new version for all of three minutes, so I certainly can’t vouch for its stability. And I haven’t tested its Script Compare ability at all, but it could be a handy way of created starred changes when you forget to turn revisions on.

Adobe Story, an early look

Screenwriting Software

Reader Andrew [pointed me](http://twitter.com/abeeken/status/4170234549) to the preview version of [Adobe Story](https://www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite/cslive/story/), the new screenwriting application that’s designed to work with Adobe’s Creative Suite.

It’s Flash-based and runs in the browser (or via Air), but does a credible job duplicating most of what you’d expect from a traditional desktop application.

screenshot

Story is definitely a work-in-progress, so it’s not fair to compare it to the dominant players in the field. In its current form, it flubs some fundamentals like drag-and-drop and keeping blocks of dialogue together.

But while you wouldn’t use it for Actual Work yet, Story does some clever things that are worth calling out.

* Story tries to identify which characters are in a scene, and uses colored-coded dots to mark them in the outline.

* The highlighter is really a highlighter, changing the background of text.

* Full-screen looks good, with everything but the page itself nice and dark.

* Find and Replace is simply a toolbar in the same window.

* Single-clicking a scene header in the outline expands it to a compressed, scrollable version of the scene, so you can check something without losing your place in the script. (Double-clicking a scene header jumps you to that scene.)

screenshot

I wish Story well. Competition is good, and a company like Adobe has the resources and experience to keep plugging at it. Yet I have a hard time envisioning it capturing a lot of ground.

Its text handling is strange, probably a result of its Flash origin. No doubt a lot of that can be remedied, but one of the consequences of platform-independence is that a web application is never going to act quite like a Windows one or a Mac one. With something as basic as text, I don’t want to have to consciously anticipate what’s going to happen if I try to select a word. Just work.

My other concerns are more philosophical. When the public preview of a screenwriting application lets dialogue spill across page breaks, I get nervous that its developers really don’t understand the format. Properly handling dialogue isn’t a feature; it’s a fundamental.

The preview version of Story does a good job importing and exporting. I didn’t test out the sharing and version-tracking features, but web-based software has a definite advantage here, and if Story is to make real inroads, it will probably be in this area. For writing teams, this can be very helpful.

I’ll be looking forward to seeing what Adobe does next with Story.

ADDED: Whenever I write about screenwriting software, the first questions are about what application I use. I alternate between Final Draft 8 and Screenwriter 6, with no strong preference between the two. I have also tried Celtx, Scrivener and Montage, but haven’t found them adequate for my work.

Final Draft 8, briefly

Screenwriting Software

VIDEO: A look at Final Draft 8 from John August on Vimeo.

Final Draft 8 is largely identical to FD7, with some better chrome. If you’re happy with FD7, the addition of a fairly useful navigator and a new XML file format may or may not be enough reason to upgrade.

I’ve been using it for a week, and so far, no crashes. There are a few quirks — awkward colorization during drag-and-drop, click-lag when editing summaries — but nothing approaching the bugginess of early FD7. It feels stable and looks like a 2009 application.

I’m not endorsing Final Draft or any of its competitors; each has its strengths and weaknesses. I’ve ping-ponged between Final Draft and Screenwriter over the years, but given its interface improvements, I’ll probably stick with Final Draft for a bit. Some of that is familiarity, frankly, particularly with how it handles production drafts.

There’s a demo version available at [the company site](http://finaldraft.com), which is worth checking out.

If you’re upgrading ($79), the mechanism for checking your current license is a bit slow. If you’re buying it new, note that it’s $50 cheaper on Amazon.

WEHT Sophocles?

Hive Mind, Screenwriting Software

A reader from Belgium writes:

questionmarkI am a dedicated user of Sophocles. Indeed, my new film, its breakdown, call sheets, budget and whatnot have been generated with that software, which I find the best, most complete, film-minded and reliable that I have ever used (and I used or tried about everything that is out there since I started working with computers, which is way back in 1981). The only drawback for a Belgian writing in Dutch or French is that it has no foreign language spelling checkers, but that is a minor hindrance compared to its many well thought out features.

However, some weeks ago, after an annoying crash, I needed to do a major overhaul of my PC on which the software is installed and suddenly the Sophocles version that I use (which is the most recent Beta version) turned out to be “non activated” – meaning that one can do everything except print whatever one needs. Activating the software presents no problem usually: you contact the maker, and a special code is mailed to you instantly, which you have then to type into a “script” page.

Then disaster struck: every trace of the Sophocles home page (www.sophocles.net) had disappeared from the surface of the Internet. And if a few days ago there were still some urls in that direction mentioned on search engines like Google (even if they delivered only web page not found error messages), now even those remnants have vanished. In semi-desperation (semi, because my producer-partner’s copy is still in perfect running order on his pc, so it’s not a matter of a Beta version being discontinued), I tried first to mail to the software support address where the messages came back as undeliverable. Then I tried to contact the maker himself, Tim Seehan, whose mail address I happen to have. There the messages were not returned, but not answered either. However, judging there are no posts as yet about this almost science-fiction like disappearance, and the recent remnants on the Net, this vanishing act must be quite recent.

Now my question: do you or one of your readers perhaps have any idea of what is going on? I would be most grateful to know this, because the software is truly a pleasure to use – on all levels of filmmaking.

— Harry Kümel

I poked around and found a [few](http://cdeemer2007.blogspot.com/2008/04/sophocles-again.html) [discussions](http://messageboard.donedealpro.com/boards/showthread.php?t=39349&page=7), but no definitive answers. Anyone out there know the scoop?

Sophocles is/was a screenwriting program for the PC that had additional features some users loved. (I tried it out using BootCamp for the Mac, but never found a need for it.) There are alternatives, but it’s always distressing when a program you rely on goes AWOL.

It’s also a good argument for open file formats.