For years, I’ve used Scrivener for developing screenplays (and then writing in either Final Draft or Fade In). I love it for that.
Recently, I’ve been writing some comic/graphic novel scripts, and have been struggling to find an adequate app to do this in. While I know that there is no agreed upon format for comics, I definitely have a format that I like. And there is even an app that uses this format – it’s called Superscript – but it gets really slooooow when working with longer (say, 150 page) documents. And the developer hasn’t supported it for years.
Scrivener is such a full fledged text editor, that I’m now wondering if I could get it to work for me. I have tried using the provided comic template, but it is lacking in a few ways.
It seems a little buggy moving from one thing to another (moving from description to dialogue to a new panel).
I far prefer how Superscript formats dialogue: Left aligned, with the number of words in each character’s dialogue being indicated, and with the total dialogue in a panel being summarized in the header. This is PHENOMENALLY helpful for keeping dialogue in comic panels readable.
Scrivener is so robust. Is there a way to set up formatting in this way?
(I tried uploading a screenshot to show what I mean, but I got a message saying media wasn’t allowed.)
Hello,
I am working on a graphic novel and settled for Scrivener.
Note that since I am also the Illustrator I can focus on what I want, not what someone else might want. My current output is PDF. I don’t fully recall what I had to do to get all of my output as needed but:
I use a folder per page and a document per panel.
So no speed issue and I can use the scrivening mode when I work - ex: clicking on a page folder shows me all panels for that page.
My page header is Comic Page <$N> (Section type is header)
In the PDF compile section I added the Panel <$SN> prefix ( I think I could do the same with the page header)
I slightly modified the script screenplay to my liking (colors, …) + added a keyword section as I insert my own keywords at the end of panels (shot, camera, location …) - it allows me to quickly search using collections.
My output has one panel per page - all panels numbers are reset when I change comic page.
The main feature I miss from other scripts app is the auto-recognition of Characters (add them/present them in a list); but I find the advantages to be many (Mix script and non-script documents, research, collections, output customization, …).