I’ve been working on a novel with Scrivener since January, and love it. Now I’m trying Scrivener to draft a new stage play. I’ve used Final Draft for years, but am not a fan of its limitations. Scrivener seems much for flexible for the drafting/creation process.
One thing that’s missing, though, for using Scrivener for writing stage or screenplays, is a page count feature that’s useful for scripts. Currently, the only option is to base page count on either word or character count. Because of the variability of these elements per page of script, they’re not actually useful for plays or screenplays. For script writers, we need the ability to set page length based on a number of actual lines/carriage returns on a page (or page inches). Sure I could just compile the script to pdf or final draft, but that’s a pain, and it really helps to have a sense of scene length as I’m writing it. I’d like to have the length of the scene displayed on the bottom of the page, along with the script elements.
I do think Scrivener has great potential as a script program for me, though.
This is a planned feature that will come down the road when Lee’s able to implement some alternate settings for how documents are viewed. It will be similar to the current footer word count in that it will go by what’s visible in the editor, rather than the compile settings, so there will be some variation in the count there and the actual count if your formatting in the editor is much different from compile, but for scriptwriting it will give a fairly accurate count since the settings should match (that is, usually for scriptwriting you’ll be working with the final formatting right in the editor and compiling it just the way you see it on the screen).
For now, the the best way to get a page count periodically is to check Project Statistics; that will calculate the Draft page count based off the compile settings so you’ll know what you’ll be printing or exporting.
I see this has been noted - though in 2011. Has the update come into play yet? Even as a novelist, one needs to see the actual pages/count. I just purchased the software. I love the organizational aspects, but HAVE to see and set the page length.
The page view mode will be part of the next major update. As noted earlier, though, this isn’t intended as an exact page count or any sort of page layout. Script mode’s strict formatting makes it easier to use as a count because the text’s formatting isn’t overridden during compile, but even there it’s necessary to view all documents together to get a total page count of all the combined documents in the binder. For novels, where you’re more likely to introduce chapter numbering, page breaks and page padding as part of compile, even if you don’t override the text formatting itself, the page count may be further off from final. For an accurate count based on the compile settings, Project Statistics is still going to be what you want.
Have you checked out the document targets? In addition to an overall project target for your draft, you can set a target for each document by clicking the bull’s eye in the right of the editor footer. A progress bar will appear in the footer when a target is set, and you’ll see the word count as x/y. You can also view and set the document targets in outliner mode by adding the “Target” column via View > Outliner Columns.