If you find that Scrivener does not meet your expectations for layout or format of the finished text (and very few will find this to be an issue), then go here and consider the following model formats from the BBC.
You can incorporate these into the Scrivener Beta 4
templates.
These formats are in PDF format and you will need Preview or Adobe Acrobat to view them. You can select and copy these then paste to a NEW PROJECT in Scrivener b4 and save as a Template.
Film
Screenplay - Standard format for films and single TV drama
Television
Screenplay - Standard format for filmed TV shows (with act breaks)
BBC Taped Drama - House-format for taped drama series
BBC Taped Sitcom - House-format for studio-based audience sitcom
Tape-Live - Standard U.S. format for taped studio shows
Three-Camera - Standard U.S. format for studio-based audience sitcom
Radio
BBC Scene Style - House-format for drama and non-audience comedy
BBC Cue Style - House-format for audience participation comedy and sketches
U.S. Radio Drama - Standard U.S. format
Stage
U.K. Stage - Acceptable U.K. format
U.S. Stage - Standard U.S. format
Manuscripts for Publication
Comic book - Full Script - Acceptable format
Comic book - Full Script - Acceptable format, screenplay style
Novel - Standard format
Short Story - Standard format
NOTE: Just be aware of the needs of yur own market because there is no such thing as a single world-wide standard. Some of the examples offered here are generic script formats based on standard industry specifications and house-styles. Those listed above can be considered BBC standard formats and US industry acceptable formats. In any case, be prepared to be a bit flexible if your publisher or producer requires other forms. Pagination, fonts and other details may also differ between organisations and productions. This variation in requirements by publishers and producers makes it imperative that you give each what they want.
Thanks to Eiron for the heads-up on this URL
EDITED to take account of the Templates function in Scrivener b4.
It wouldn’t take a whole lot of effort for someone to create an XSLT stylesheet that would allow exporting a MMD formatted document from Scrivener to some of these formats, particularly the Short Story and Novel formats. It would use LaTeX as the intermediate, and simply set up the LaTeX formatting rules to use Courier font, the proper margins, ragged right formatting, etc. Scene and Chapter breaks would be trivial.
This sort of thing is exactly what MultiMarkdown was designed to allow: one source document format, and multiple output formats.
If someone works on this, I will be glad to help out, and to include it in the MMD distribution for others to use and improve.
Basically, this lets you export to something very closely approximating the manuscript format for novels listed above. There is a LaTeX class to be installed(manuscript) and another XSLT file that has to be added to the Scrivener Application Bundle.
Then you can look at the example files (the only difference is which XSLT file is called). When you export, you get two different LaTeX files, which you can then run through XeLaTeX (NOT REGULAR PDFLATEX). I recommend using TeXShop for this. You must have XeTeX installed, so far as I know.
This is an ADVANCED feature, and requires some leg work (but not much) to get it going. Anyone can download the file above and check out the PDF’s to see how the output looks.
I am not going to offer support on this at this time, but will accept suggestions on how to improve the XSLT file. At some point this might make it into the default version of Scrivener.
But mainly I wanted to practice using some of XeTeX’s font features (which I did learn something about.)
I whipped up an XSLT to be compatible with the sffms class. Still testing 1 or 2 things, but that is probably the way to go. The automatic word count is pretty handy, even if it’s not that accurate.
