I don’t expect Scrivener to add the complex page-break behaviors that screenwriting software such as Final Draft has, but I do wish that it would not orphan a Transition, Scene Heading, Character, or Parenthetical element at the bottom of the page in a compiled draft.
In Word (shudder) this is called “Keep with next” and it strikes me that it might be a generally useful feature even for prose writing. If it were available as a general feature in Scrivener then it could automatically be a property of the screenplay elements that don’t make sense orphaned at the bottom of a page.
Any interest in something like this? Again, not expecting Scrivener to replace Final Draft, but I’m just wishing that I didn’t have to export to Final Draft before printing a rough draft of a screenplay.
I’d love to add this, so yes, I am interested, but unfortunately widows and orphans and “keep with next” are not trivial from a coding perspective, especially when using a third-party text engine such as the OS X text system which doesn’t have such features built in - it means trying to intercept layout at the correct time and interfering. I have spent a couple of wasted months on trying to implement such a feature in the past, and abandoned it. I have new hope, as the creator of Pagehand recently shared some code with me for doing this sort of thing, but even there I have so far failed to get it working quite as it should (although I haven’t had time to investigate properly). I intend to use one of my Technical Support tickets with the Apple developer program on just this issue, in fact, but that is still no guarantee. So, there will be some work going into this for 2.0, but I have no idea whether that will equate to its successful implementation.
In the meantime, of course, all of this stuff is handled fine in Final Draft once you have exported to there, and I imagine most scriptwriters will be exporting to such a program when they get to a stage where they are ready to share their script with others.
Yeah, you’d think. But in fact I am going to go through as many drafts as possible within Scrivener, showing people and getting feedback from my trusted sources, before switching over. And the reason is that Final Draft scrapes on my soul with a rusty lawn mower blade, and Scrivener rules.