Using verse in a screenplay or stage play

[philrickaby]

I’ve been searching for a while for a way to do this, but haven’t found anything. I’m looking to be able to include verse within my script. The problem is for verse, a line break needs to move to the next line as in:

Thou speak’st aright;
I am that merry wanderer of the night.
I jest to Oberon and make him smile
When I a fat and bean-fed horse beguile,
Neighing in likeness of a filly foal:
And sometime lurk I in a gossip’s bowl,
In very likeness of a roasted crab,
And when she drinks, against her lips I bob
And on her wither’d dewlap pour the ale.

But when I use a script format, this comes out:

Thou speak’st aright;

I am that merry wanderer of the night.

I jest to Oberon and make him smile

When I a fat and bean-fed horse beguile,

Neighing in likeness of a filly foal:

And sometime lurk I in a gossip’s bowl,

In very likeness of a roasted crab,

And when she drinks, against her lips I bob

And on her wither’d dewlap pour the ale.

How can I get verse to display the way I want it?

[xiamenese]

I should think using “Line break”—Ctrl-Return on my system—rather than straightforward Return would be the answer. You may be doing that already.

However, you don’t say which version of MacOS you are using. If you are on 10.12.x, there is an Apple TextKit display bug introduced with Sierra, whereby line breaks appear with the paragraph spacing of a normal Return. If you turn on Format > Options > Show Invisibles you will see that the lines end with the hooked arrow rather than the pilcrow of Return. So on Compile, everything will be as you wish, but within Scrivener, or any word processor based on TextKit, you will see the apparently wrong formatting.

MacOS 10.12.5 has not eliminated the bug; I don’t know whether KB has found a solution in version 3, currently in internal beta testing, we are told.

Mark

[philrickaby]

Thank you for this. I see, as you describe, the line break indicator. But when I compile to PDF, the line breaks are still treated as paragraph. I do notice that in any other format, the problem doesn’t exist.
So, thank you for your help!

[xiamenese]

Yep. I thought it might be Preview, but even PDFPen Pro shows the wrong spacing. But exporting to RTF and opening it in NWP setting the line spacing appropriately and printing it as PDF and the spacing is right.

So you know where you are … until Apple finally gets down to squashing the bug. Rumour has it that there’s MacOS 10.13 coming out sometime soonish; maybe it’ll be squashed then. In the meantime …

Mark

Edit: Incidentally, Nisus seem to have found a way round the bug in NWP (also based on TextKit) … though as I said in my PM I think, maybe in v. 3 …