I am a playwright and I love using Scrivener. It’s especially useful while developing a play–going through revision after revision. While developing a play, it is a lot of work to export it to another word processing program for formatting every time you have a new revision, and as such I have come across a few formatting things it would be nice to be able to do in Scrivener. Maybe someone has already figured out how to do these things, in which case, let me know!
Character names. One big pet peeve I have with the formatting of some scripts is when they do not reprint a Character’s name at the top of the next page, when a line of dialogue is being continued from the previous page. I was taught that you should reprint the character’s name followed by (Continued). It would be great if Scrivener did this automatically. Back when I used Word to write plays, I had to use a complicated series of page breaks to make this happen, and then I had to redo it every time I made changes to the script.
Page numbers. At a certain point in a play’s development process, it is customary to lock the page numbers as much as possible. When new pages are written, or when pages are revised, they are given special page numbers (12.1, 12.2, etc.) so collaborators can insert them into their binders without messing up the page numbers or having to get a whole new script. It would be great to be able to do this easily on Scrivener–lock down the page numbers outside of any pages you are revising. An extra plus would be if you could then choose to compile for print only those pages which you’d revised.
Does anyone have similar issues, solutions to these issues, or further formatting requests?
Both of these issues that you bring up are reasons why we really don’t tout Scrivener as being anything other than a drafting tool, and especially so once you get into production with a script. We just don’t even try to compete with stuff like Final Draft or similar, focussing more on the initial writing phase. One is expected to at some point to switch over to production phase tools, where page numbers really start to matter and so on, and our goal with that is to make the transition as seamless and easy as we can.
These two issues in particular are the way they are simply because there is no control over this kind of stuff. The software doesn’t have a page layout engine (to get a printout we just feed OS X a text file and it does all of the layout), it has no clue what page anything is on, or if a dialogue rolls across a break and onto the next page. The same sort of limitations also impact page number, of course.
Actually, this part isn’t strictly true. Scrivener’s page layout mode is entirely hand-coded by me, although it uses the OS X text layout system and is based on the example Apple provides for creating page layout views with its TextEdit code. But the keep-with-next code and the way Scrivener can use different headers for front matter and so on is all code I’ve written for its page layout engine. So it does have a page layout engine, and when Scrivener prints anything, it gets pushed into the same kind of page layout view you can show in the editor in order to lay out its pages.
The problems at hand are still difficult ones to solve however. Scrivener can handle providing different headers and footers for different pages by laying out all of the text, and then examining which text falls on which pages in that final layout. Fixing page numbers isn’t something that could really be done with this system, because, as Ioa says, Scrivener doesn’t have any idea what page anything is on until after its been laid out for printing or generating a PDF. It would have no way of looking at a future print-out and saying, “this page was formerly numbered thus.” So that is definitely the sort of thing best left for production, and we’d definitely never claim that Scrivener was designed for the production process.
The other issue of adding “CONT’D” is also something we generally leave for dedicated scriptwriting programs once the work has been exported from Scrivener for much the same reason. It might be possible to add some form of “CONT’D”, but it would slow things down. The trouble is that Scrivener would have to lay out all of the text, then run through the laid-out text looking for any dialogue that falls across a page break. Then it has to insert the “CONT’D” line, relayout and do the same thing again. There are certain problems in the OS X text system that can cause issues here. However, I will put it on my list to take another look at this, to see if this is something that can be achieved. Internally, it would pretty much have to try to do what you did manually in Word, though.
That would, I hope, only be an option when compiling from scriptwriting mode.
IME, CONT’D is fast becoming an anachronism. I’ve currently got over 130 scripts that I am assessing on behalf of a theatre company, and not a single writer has used CONT’D. Personally, I think it adds clutter and is distracting. The actor really should know if they are speaking or not. Never heard a director or actor complain about the absence of CONT’Ds. Appreciate that other people have different views.
Attended the initial reading of a play a few weeks ago in London where the script (not mine) had been given out beforehand as an ebook. Easier for the writer (and editor/advisor) to make and then distribute changes, without the time and cost wastage associated with reprinting. Easier for the actors to choose the font face and size they want. Easier for everyone to make annotations or search for specific lines. With “scrolling view” there are no breaks and no need for CONT’Ds.