Bug #1
Shot Element setting ‘Paragraph > Space Before’ should be 12.00pt by default not 24.00pt.
The default Shot Element settings are completely redundant with the default Scene Heading Element settings. Because of the common use of calling out various shots or information within a specific scene, “CLOSE ON JIM”, “THE BOMB UNDER THE TABLE”, etcetera, and the very frequent appearance of these, screenwriting software provides the use of a Shot Heading element which does not force two blank lines above the element (where a Scene Heading would), but only one blank line. The reason being, that over the length of a screenplay, the additional whitespace will add unwanted pages to the final length of the screenplay — which, by convention and by contract, the screenwriting industry aims to minimize.
Bug #2
.Fountain export process does not force any elements by inserting a leading character besides the Scene Heading Element. Inserting the following characters on export at the beginning of each element will define the element for any subsequent programs trying to read the .fountain file and eliminate misinterpretation:
Scene Heading: “.”
Action: “!”
Character: “@”
Transition: “>”
Because Fountain syntax recognizes any lines that start in UPPERCASE (and not with “INT”, “EXT”, or “.”) as a CHARACTER NAME and automatically then assumes the next element to be DIALOGUE, all Shot Heading Elements and following Action Elements are misinterpreted in the exported fountain file. Identical misinterpretation will occur for any scrivener file where the Action Element has been used and manually UPPERCASED in circumvention of Bug #1.
On export, Scrivener does force Scene Headings with the insertion of a “.” into the fountain file, but does not do the same with any other element.
I’m sure there is a long list of bug fixes for Windows updates, but these fixes (particularly bug #2, as bug #1 can be manually addressed by the user in settings) would be very quick to implement and would improve the functionality of Scrivener as a screenwriting program to a very large degree. As it stands, exporting screenplays into external screenwriting software for finalization (Scrivener/compile is currently not up to this task, in my opinion) involves hours of cleanup — compounded because the cleanup process breaks other things like italicization, underlining, etc. — and because the other option of exporting as an .fdx Final Draft document likewise seems to be very broken (the exported .fdx in the following example opens as a 5-page blank document.)
Formatting as it appears in Scrivener:
And as it appears in Fade In Pro after Fountain export:
I have tested both exported .fountain and .fdx files some while back in Final Draft to identical results.