A few days ago I was attempting to change the format on one version of one play script amongst about 5 different scripts (and 4-5 revisions of each script) within a single project. Now I’ve discovered that I appear to have completely changed the formatting (and formatting standards) for every script (including all drafts of every script throughout the project.
And, to add insult to injury, when I was doing the original conversion and it asked me to tell it what elements to change to what, I appeared to have assigned things incorrectly.
And the script setting seem to say NOT all caps for things that are being displayed in all caps.
And as it stands now, for some reason all script elements seem to have been converted to general text, and all caps. And when I try to change them by hand to dialogue, action etc. they seem to align correctly, but I can’t get the caps lock to come off.
For now, the formatting on other Scrivener projects seems to be unaffected.
My questions are these:
What did I do?
How do I fix this?
Is there any way to reinstall the script templates for this one project and not mess with my other projects’ formatting.
Can I do it in such a way that it will reformat all versions of the scripts in this project (just as it did when I screwed things up)?
I’m not sure if this helps diagnose the problem, but:
I just tried opening a new document in the same project, and if I start typing it seems to format okay. But if I copy in text from one of the corrupted documents it comes in all as General text and all in caps (more or less centered).
If I then try to reformat line by line, it put things in the right place, but still all in caps.
One thing to make note of is that Scrivener isn’t a scriptwriting-based program, in the sense that CeltX or Final Draft is. Text is not “assigned” to elements, and text is not transformed dynamically by a definition of that element. Hence, if something is all caps in the editor, it is literally all-caps (you have to convert it back to lowercase and fix any nouns and sentences yourself). If something is halfway across the editor, then it is literally indented at the text formatting level.
If you change what an element looks like, in the script settings for the project, then a span of text no longer matching the definitions of what said element looks like will be unrecognised and referred to as “General” text. This doesn’t mean it is “corrupted”, it just means you have dialogue stipulated as being indented by such and such an amount, but actual text with literal formatting that is indented by a different amount. Change your definition for what a dialogue line should be indented to, to match the text’s formatting, and that text will go back to being recognised.
Conversion is how you can make a formatting transition when changing script types. Scrivener then takes the old definition of a dialogue line, looks for text with formatting matching that, and then changes the formatting of that text so that it matches the new definition. If you do not properly convert the script, then text will likely not be recognised and be marked as “General”.
So, all of this also means you can only have one script format per project. It sounds like you might be trying to write five different scripts into one project, and that’s not going to work out very well. You should have one project for each script, but more likely it will be best to just write the script to completion in one format, and then produce project copies and run a conversion to the different script format, then. That way you aren’t making edits across several different projects.