Hi all,
This element is right center even though it’s set to Center in the Script Settings/Paragraph. It’s very far off compared to General Text (Centered) and looks terrible. I’ve played with editing the Settings before and am not keen on doing it again lol. Everything else looks fine.
What can I do/change to have this happen correctly when I hit Enter after a line of dialog?
should be like this:
Character name (centered)
dialog dialog dialog (then ENTER to Character element gets me this)
Aren’t these two completely different things? If you examine the Format ▸ Scriptwriting ▸ Script Settings... panel for “Character”, you will find they are not centre-aligned, but left aligned, with the left edge starting at the 4in point (once compiled with a 1in left margin; the values will say 3in in the setup).
As noted in the sample script PDF, character names are meant to be indented flush with the scene heading and set description, not centre-aligned. Naturally, you might have a different standard you are writing to and that is fine, but that is how the template was set up to work.
The General (Centered) thing, on the other hand, is actual centre-alignment, which will cause left edge of the text to shift over beyond the 4in mark if it is long enough. It is also, since it is centre-aligned, potentially going to be all over the place in the text editor itself as the middle point of your editor may be a long way away from the actual printed middle. You can observe this effect by making the editor wider and narrower.
I see what you’re saying, but it’s much further right than in the Sample. I don’t think I’d have a problem with it otherwise (I decided to try actual center-aligning per the Dramatist Guild’s Modern US Stage Play format).
So you’re saying the Setting for Character/Paragraph should be Left, not Center? (Would like to confirm that before I adjust that setting.)
Well don’t take my word for it, I’m not an expert on the different standards around the world, and there is always house style to account for. Asking around with those you’ll be working with would be best, or a colleague who has worked with the production before.
That aside, yes the design/standard that we made this template for starts set description, scene heading, character names (and a few other things I think) at roughly the middle of the page, but all of that text is left aligned from that point, extending to the right margin before wrapping.
For me I do get something like the sample PDF if I compile to RTF. I did that so I could examine the ruler settings in LibreOffice, to make sure it didn’t come out in a different place than the other elements that follow this left 3in indent. LibreOffice is like Scrivener in that it counts 0in as the start of the text block, rather than the left edge of the sheet of paper, as I believe Word does. So Word might say 4in, while Scrivener and LO say 3in. Either way it works out the same, it’s about down the middle of US Letter if you print it out and take a ruler to it.
(LibreOffice on top, showing compiled sample text, Scrivener’s sample PDF below. And well, after I took the screenshot and annotated it, I noticed I didn’t show the actual character name line—you’ll just have to trust me it’s lined up with everything else in both. )
You should be able to post screenshots now (new user limitation). For a screenshot, I would suggest turning on View ▸ Text Editing ▸ Show Ruler, and putting the cursor in the line that is wrong; that way the indent markers can be seen.
Just to clear up any potential confusions with settings having been tinkered with, this behaviour you describe of the Character line starting too far over happens if you make a new stageplay project as a test, and type in a few lines? Because that’s all I did for my test, I didn’t touch any settings or change the compile setup.
So I ended up making a copy, took the original out of Script mode, then changed the Settings to Character/Paragraph/Left on the copy in Script mode and that is working. Looks great!
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