First line of dialogue on BBC radio style script format doesn't auto capitalise

Scrivener Scrivener for Windows
1

I’ve started using this format a lot because I like the layout.

I start a new file, hit enter to get the dropdown box, select Character. I enter the character name, hit tab, and a colon appears and it switches to dialogue mode. However the first line of dialogue doesn’t auto capitalise.

This was also an issue in Scrivener 2 on Mac. Am I doing something wrong, is it a bug, or is it like this for some reason?

2

I think it has more to do with a conflict in what is typically considered good style, the phrase following a colon is not a new sentence, and rare cases like this where the colon is being used less as a grammatical device, and more as a visual technique to set a piece of metadata (the speaker’s identity) away from the text.

To that end, if you just picked this form for its visual appearance, and you would be fine with some other way of visually distinguishing the marker from the rest of the line, you can change it to “.”, and now the engine considers the following text a new sentence.

Instructions for changing separator...
  1. Use the Format ▸ Scriptwriting ▸ Script Settings... menu command.
  2. Select the “Character & Dialogue” element and click the “Tabs/Return” tab.
  3. Toward the bottom, where Tabbing after typing is set, change the punctuation mark to insert.

Or you could just use the Shift key if you think that looks weird.

1 Like
3

Ok thanks it makes sense as a solution. I can change it so that it works. Would it be hard to code it so that it auto capitalises after a colon, solely in this instance?

4

In my opinion there is no clearly right answer to this particular behaviour. That’s what you want (and probably anyone using this particular script mode), but someone else might need their script settings to work the way it currently works. So when you have something ambiguous like that, you need to select a behaviour that avoids the most friction in getting around it.

In this case, say you needed “:” and couldn’t go with “.”. For you to work around the issue all you have to do is type normally with the Shift key now and then, it’s extremely easy to add a capital letter. But if it worked in your favour, then those that needed a lowercase letter would have to do a lot more to get that result, in that it would take manual editing after you’ve written a bit, to fix it.