I’m a comic writer (with some development experience). I first want to say that I’ve been using scrivener for a long time, definitely since early version 1. I am current with the versions and have loved the evolution of the program. But your comic script formats are not functional for professional production scripts with complex lettering instructions.
Lettering elements (all words you see on a finished comic page) in comic scripts should have a column for numbers either on the left or the right side of the page. This column should not affect the in-line formatting of the element it denotes, and it should be able to be restarted either by the occurrence of a specific script element, or simply create a running tally of lettering elements throughout the entire project.
But I cannot get any functionally formatted numbering system to work with this.
Every attempt at implementing this through inline placeholders and auto-completes, with and without compile replacements, leaves me frustrated with insufferably complex keystroke complications, creativity-breaking sluggishness, and distracting formatting issues and breaks.
You have an awesome compile feature, the compile paragraph styles settings, that, with some tab tinkering, allows for adding autonumbered prefixes to specific paragraph styles.
This could be amazing for adding these lead-in numbers (as named autonumber streams) for lettering elements… Except there doesn’t seem to be a way to actually implement this with script mode.
I know I can copy the font and paragraph settings from a selection of text to the script element in the script settings, but this does not actually identify the text of the element with the paragraph style and the compile paragraph style features only apply to text specifically tagged as that paragraph style.
I have long wondered why there wasn’t a direct connection between the formatting in the script settings and the paragraph styles list. A conditional checkbox to choose between using script setting formatting or choosing a paragraph style for all the relevant font and paragraph settings could fix this. Script mode would override the settings that decide what formatting is applied during script-specific actions, basically overriding the paragraph style settings it needs to when a paragraph is both a style and an element, but still retain the identification of the paragraph style for use with compile features.
Implementing script elements into the compile paragraph styles settings, as in allowing one to choose a script element to apply the same settings to, could be an alternative to the above if there’s some coding incompatibility with using paragraph styles directly with the script mode.
Even in the case that these things are just not compatible, adding a feature to make specific script elements have a left or right justified column for numbers would work since I could just have the “lettering copy” element contain this numbering stream as it’s used to hold all the actual blocks of lettering meant to be seen on the final page. I’m sure there are other non-comic script formats that could be served by a separate column for numbering specific elements.
There are some comic-script-specific competitors out there that have this lettering numbering system, but their other features are terrible when compared to Scrivener as a whole. Yet this is a feature that is significant for large, complex production comic scripts with teams of more than two people and I think implementing the paragraph styles into the script settings would add a massive amount of versatility to the script mode features as a whole.