Since the thread has drifted in the direction of Final Draft and Courier, I’d like to use the opportunity to once again point out how abysmal Final Draft’s type rendering is.
My path to Scrivener was through the excellent Write Room (I actually think an AmberV post in their forum got me here), and the reason I started looking around at all is because staring at the ratty way FD presents courier was driving me insane. I’m almost done with the Scrivener draft of my current script, and I’m really not looking forward to living in Final Draft again. Really, they should be embarrassed.
Don’t get me started on Final Draft. Like many others, I went back to FD6 because FD7 was so buggy. Company’s gone straight to hell, too, if you ask me.
That FD insanity is exactly how I ended up here with Scrivener. After switching over to OS X and getting spoiled by native applications, working in FD is like jumping into a time machine. It’s absolutely crazy to stare for hours and hours at that antique user interface and abysmal text rendering, after all this progress has been made on the OS X platform!
I tried working with a screenplay template in Mellel, I tried convincing Blue Tech to develop a screenplay version of Ulysses, I tried beta testing Montage, I tried convincing Hog Bay to develop a screenplay version of Write Room. Then finally I discovered Scrivener!
So I write in Scrivener, and import into FD6 only when I absolutely have to. I also went back to 6 after upgrading to FD7.
Thanks for that information. I’ve always wondered about this. I print to a Canon Pixma iP4000 via OS X 10.4.8, and I’ve always felt that the Courier Final Draft looked anemic. I wonder if this can be improved?
How exactly do you solve this with better drivers?
Look on Canon’s site to see if they have a more current driver.
To test if your printer is working correctly, Make an RTF document in TextEdit, and write three lines, one under the next. Format one in Courier, one in Courier Final Draft, and one in Times. Now print and compare.
If all three look the same, your printer is substituting all fonts; if the two couriers look the same, your printer isn’t using Courier Final Draft. If Courier looks lighter than Courier Final Draft, it’s a subjective issue, and you could adjust the printer to print darker overall.
Or, you could come to grips with the sad revelation that Courier Final Draft is the font-of-the-realm, and get used to it.
Thanks for the info. I installed the latest driver, did the the test, and it confirmed the printer is using the correct fonts. Courier Final Draft is lighter than Courier.
OS X comes with two versions of Courier - “Courier” and “Courier New”. “Courier New” is thinner than “Courier”. To me, it looks as though popcornflix used “Courier New”, not “Courier”, in his image, whereas you used the straight “Courier”, which is indeed thicker.
Best,
Keith
Actually, my image came from vintagetype.com, and it uses standard Courier.
It appears that Apple updated Courier to be similar to HP’s very popular Courier Dark, and made no announcement of it. It seems to have happened within the last 18 months or so.
I checked the metrics, and it looks like it’s 10-pitch. It doesn’t change the page count when substituted for CFD.
THANKS for pointing this out! Nice, dark type. I wonder if it will substitute a thinner courier if you send a PDF to a Windows machine…?
I know. For awhile there I was posting FD rants in every forum I visited.
I can’t understand their lack of responsiveness to the needs of the professional writer. I’ve written them a couple of times to request features (full screen, a better interface, readable type) and I keep getting responses along the lines of “we’re a small company, and we’re trying our best.” Their best? Have they used their software lately? Have they noticed how much better Scrivener, Write Room and the rest look? Have they seen Scrivener’s notecard implementation? Sorry FD – development staffs don’t get much smaller than one guy, and he’s blowing you away.
The last email from them said that full screen wasn’t slated for FD8, but might be addressed by FD9!! Which is awesome – I can write full screen in the back of my flying car on my way to my 75th high school reunion.
It’s sad, really. The last year or so has been kind of a breakthrough year for brilliant writing software. I was hoping FD would rise to the occasion. I think my only alternative is to wait for the new Movie Magic (which I hear is good) or for Montage to get it’s act together. I miss the old BC Software and the days of Three By Five.
Of course, I’m happy to have Scrivener for my first drafts. Even without page breaks.
The guy who started the company sold out around v6 to the marketing guy. I heard that they started enforcing hard deadlines on programmers. That means the software ships on the announced date, whether it has bugs or not. So earlier adopters are actually beta-testers.
Their latest move was to buy a screenwriting magazine and a screenwriting expo, since apparently you don’t have to do as much to make money from those.
Phooey.
Okay, you made me do a spit take. Funny!
The existing script processors s-u-c-k. The only way Scrivener could be much better is if Keith were a screenwriter, and therefore as obsessed as we are with getting the best script tools possible.
Scrivener 101 just plain rocks me like a hurricane.
These screenwriting threads have been very interesting to me. It sounds like everyone loathes FD, but that FD does do a good job at final formatting. So no one wants to write on FD, but they feel compelled, because of its adherence to the standards, to use the formatting functions of FD. Is that right?
If so, might it not be possible to set up a template in another WP, such as Mellel to do the formatting? Or even to find someone who’s interested in writing a formatting-only app to do something along these lines?
I guess this is probably a naive question, but what’s in the way of that happening?
I know, it’s an outrage. It’s over $200 at retail and $89 for an upgrade for crying out loud!
And they sell Syd Field videos and they sponsor their Big Break contest. Next thing you know they’ll start offering one of those “coverage services” like people used to advertise in the back of Premiere Magazine… oh, wait… Jesus. They should just go all out and sell maps to the stars’ homes.
Look, I support FD’s right to be in the Get Rich Writing Screenplays! business – it’s tacky and exploitative and I want no part of it, but they have the right. But they shouldn’t expect to be leveraging that “industry standard” title for much longer. Someone is going to figure out how to make a world class screenwriting app, and writers all over L.A. will line up to buy it. (Pudgiest. Line. Ever.)
It’s more of a production issue. FD has (and works well with other apps that have) a lot of features that make it easier for producers to break down a script – to figure out the who/what/where of the script so they can assign dollar amounts to those elements and budget the movie. That’s what makes FD the industry standard. (This is especially true of the “indie” film world, where smaller producers are budgeting all by themselves.)
If formatting were the only issue, FD wouldn’t have such a stranglehold (especially in a PDF world that makes file format a non-issue). Screenplay format is essentially just tab settings. The standard format that Final Draft spits out was created on manual typewriters, and you can set up pretty much any word processing app to emulate it. Because there are so many of these little formatting things, writing a properly formatted script in Word, say, is a pain in the ass without FD’s shortcuts, but it’s certainly possible. There are templates (not to mention other apps – Movie Magic Screenwriter, Celtx and Mariner’s Montage among them) all over the web that can help. But FD is what most people have, and it’s what most producers use.
I’ve just come back to this thread (after being locked away finishing a draft…) and I just want to clarify the point I made about Final Draft which sort of hijacked the thread in my absence.
Apart from the relatively very few people who make a living – or any money at all – as screenwriters, what FD and its competitors are actually selling is a dream. The dream of being In Hollywood. (The dream is being sold, naturally, to people who don’t realise that being In Hollywood as a writer is like being in a turkey-shoot as a turkey.)
How the dream is sold is by the assumption that, where formatting is concerned, “the converse is also true”, which we were all taught in school mathematics.
They don’t actually say it, but the schtick all tends to a false syllogism:
(1) If your screenplay is improperly formatted, it will not be accepted.
(2) Final Draft (or whatever) will ensure your screenplay is properly formatted.
(3) So use Final Draft (or whatever) and your screenplay will be accepted.
We all know that’s untrue. But we also know that wearing a rugged manly watch won’t make us rugged and manly, or that those yellow Timberland boots aren’t going to erase the belly and the years and turn us into explorers. But we still buy them.
I may be particularly biased because the first script I sold (it was commissioned) was done with no formatting, on an Olivetti. They had it professionally typed up.
For sure, I do very little script work now, and undoubtedly things have changed as the industry has become more standardised and mechanised in every aspect of production. But if it’s got to the point where original work is passed over in favour of “properly” formatted me-too stuff, then no wonder Hollywood gets blinded by a Little Miss Sunshine year after year…
Final Draft is “industry standard” for a few reasons.
It was the first WYSIWYG script processor. Before FD, you had to write your scripts with embedded code, and use a program called SCRIPTOR to reformat it and see your page breaks. WYSIWYG changed the industry, and killed Scriptor. The only reasons MMS is still on the market is that FD ignored Windows for years, and MMS slipped into the market gap.
It lets you write and not worry about formatting. Once you learn the tab/return system, it’s pretty intuitive to write a script in FD. Any template system takes some fussing. Screenwriters are a bunch of near-Luddites, and don’t like to fuss. FD handles everything from margins to mores & continueds.
It handles production specific formatting easily. Show me a Word template that handles revision marks properly. Or how Mellel can tell the salmon pages from the goldenrod ones. Final Draft handles revisions, locked pages, A&B pages, colored revisions – all with ease. It was designed for it.
Everybody has it. If you’re sending an editable file to anyone – writing partner, producer, agent, etc. Final Draft is the program that everyone has. If you don’t have Final Draft, you’re kind of out of the loop.
All that being said, Movie Magic Screenwriter is a close second. Their sales are nearly as big, they have as many celebrity endoresements, and several high-profile writers have migrated to MMS because of FD’s crappy service of the last few years.
Both programs are making bold strides into the 1990s as far as software design is concerned. That’s why I love Scrivener. It’s a modern way to write a screenplay. I want to keep my process in Scrivenenr as long as possible before I have to convert to Final Draft and send out the draft to the rest of the world.
I think the “selling the dream” thing is accurate, but it doesn’t bother me, because I need the rugged boots and manly watch for my job. They have to work, and they have to last. I don’t care if wannabe’s are buying tools they don’t need. I care if the tools I do need are well-designed and maintained so I can be competitive in my work.
I agree with Popcorn’s comments above, although I do think that “selling the dream” is a priority for Final Draft. And by “selling” I mean “exploiting”. And by “priority” I mean “central reason they seem to have stopped developing their software for the last decade”. My thoughts on this are well documented in this forum, and that’s all I’ll say about it here.
I take serious issue with a couple of Michael’s comments:
I want to apologize to any prospective screenwriter to whom I gave advice about proper formatting. I stupidly glossed over the method of getting a commission to write a script, writing it any way you want and having someone else format it for you so producers can figure out how much it’s going to cost. While perhaps not the most efficient way to go about things, it certainly is one way. Also, I understand if you rub certain lamps, a genie will grant you wishes. That’s another good way to get your script made.
Sorry for the sarcasm, Michael, but yours is not an argument against proper formatting at all. In the end, your script was properly formatted. Or, to use your term, professionally formatted, which I think is a correct description.
Screenplay formatting hasn’t changed to fit a more standardized industry. The main point of the formatting is its consistency over the years – the page-a-minute format has proven to be an effective means of budgeting a very expensive process, and proper format exists to keep page count as reliable as possible.
Nothing’s changed, Michael. Casablanca was written in that format. His Girl Friday was written in that format. As for indie films like Little Miss Sunshine, standard format is even more important. Small films have less money to play with, and a producer’s ability to properly budget a little movie is vital.
What has changed is the number of submissions studios and agents get every day. Screenplay writing has become, in some circles, viewed as a lottery of sorts – a get rich quick scheme – and anyone with any power in Hollywood will tell you that the number of submissions they get every day is flat out unmanageable. Making initial judgments based on format is one way for readers to get out from under. That may be an unfair criterion, and may in fact be antithetical to finding unique creative work, but that’s the way it is.
Professional screenplay format exists because it makes good business sense. It wasn’t created to be a tool of exclusion, but its very necessity has made it one. An aspiring screenwriter ignores it at his or her peril.
P.S. Being a writer in Hollywood is not like being a turkey in a turkey shoot. It’s like being the guy who said “let’s get these turkeys all in one place, so it’s easier to shoot them” – only to discover later that it’s the guy with the gun who gets all the credit. As, y’know, a master turkey… killer. Or something. Because he’s the director, see? Wow, I suck.
