One consistent feedback we received from many of the early adopters of Scrite, who are professional screenplay writers themselves, was this: Scrite must support industry standard formatting. Infact our mentors: Director Abhaya Simha & Director Adarsh Eshwarappa were also suggesting that we start focusing on industry standard formatting.
Writer & director Sudarshan (FB Link), who is also a developer of Kannada Fonts, wrote to us and shared specific information about formatting rules that needs to be used in Screenplays and the reason why those formatting options are used by the industry. Action paragraphs leave 1.5″ margin on the left. Character names must leave 3.7″ margin on the left and so on. You can Google to find out all about industry standard formatting.
Up until 0.3.8 Beta, we didn’t bother so much about industry standard formatting as much as we bothered about providing an app that lets writers just write.
But with 0.4.0 Beta, we now support industry standard formatting.
The new and improved Screenplay Editor module in Scrite provides accurate positioning of paragraphs even as you type. The ruler on the top provides a way for you to know out how much indentation each paragraph will have on the final printed document (or in the PDF).
Notice the page number and page count towards the bottom left on the status bar? Many early adopters told us that they would love to know which page number they are in while they are typing. This because each page on the screenplay translates roughly 1 minute of screen time, which means page could translates to the length of the film. Knowing which page number the cursor is currently in, is obviously insightful for a writer.
We have removed the old screenplay editor from the structure tab as well. Although we have retained the “scene character list” feature, which was appreciated by many.
Since Scrite is already computing page layout across all scenes in your screenplays, it is only natural that users be able to generate a preview of their screenplay right within the app without having to generate a PDF.
Scrite uses industry standard formatting not only in the onscreen editor, it also uses the same while generating previews and even PDF.
Until 0.3.8, we were only making incremental changes to the app. The new screenplay editor is perhaps the most sweeping change in the Scrite code base since the first beta was released. While we have tested it as much as possible, you may run into issues while using the app; in which case please send us your feedback. Over the next few updates, the new editor will become more feature rich and stable.
While Scrite continues to remain in beta mode, we are inching closer and closer to a 1.0 master, although we don’t have any confirmed schedule for the same as yet.
Download the latest beta and try out the new screenplay editor.