Script Dialogue Formatting

[masfur]

Good morning.
When formatting a screenplay in Scrivener, can I insert a TAB after Character, perhaps with a code, so as to align first line after Character?
Thank you.

This is my layout. After Character there are undefined space. But with TAB…

[Ken_Watts]

I have the exact same problem. I don’t think your suggested approach will work, though, because Scrivener is already inserting a tab there–it just isn’t being recognized by the editor. If you turn on the invisibles, you can see that there’s a tab character there rather than a bunch of spaces or something.

I hope someone knows how to fix this. I just started using Scrivener, love the whole concept, but have been stuck on this problem for two days out of the box… There has to be a simple solution that I’m missing.

[simeva]

I have a work-round for this. It will only work with a mono-spaced font such as courier where each glyph takes up the same space. (I’m saying ‘glyph’ here rather than ‘font character’ to avoid confusion with ‘character’ meaning a speaker in the script!).

• set the left indent and first tab to the size you want them

• work out how many glyphs this left indent is (eg in my set-up, a 1.5 inch indent represents 12 glyph spaces)

• for each character (ie speaker), create an autocomplete entry with the right number of white space after the name (in the screenshot below, I’ve replaced the spaces with numbers in the Test entry - all the actual character names below have the right number of spaces after them)

Now when you start typing the character’s name on a new line in your script, Scrivener offers the autocomplete. Press Tab and your cursor is taken to the right place to begin typing dialogue.

It helps if all your character names start with a different letter. You’ll also need to create a new Script settings file for each play that you write.