The state of the screenwriting software art: 2013 edition

February 7th, 2013 | by | screenwriting

Feb
07

I’ve done this a couple of times now — sat down annually to summarize the state of the art in screenwriting software — and it’s not completely off-topic to wonder just what the point is, especially to do it as often as every year. After all, the 12-point Courier screenwriting format has existed pretty much unchanged since the first caveman banged out the first screenplay and went looking for an agent.

A fair point, maybe. But. While the screenplay format may well be the one single constant in human history, everything else changes.

Read full story

Mobile screenwriting revisited

September 4th, 2012 | by | screenwriting

Sep
04

Last week Final Draft finally released its iPad-only Final Draft Writer, and announced that its regular price would be $49.99.

That $50 price tag for an app is pretty awesome. Not nearly as awesome as it would’ve been if Final Draft had the balls to ask a thousand dollars for it, but…pretty awesome all the same.

Read full story

Open Screenplay Format

February 12th, 2012 | by | screenwriting

Feb
12

There were a couple of discussions about Fountain here and there in the last few days, and one thing that came up was how a plain-text format screenplay was futureproof and therefore safer for long-term storage than a proprietary binary format.

That’s the reason that Fade In uses Open Screenplay Format.

Read full story

Fountain

February 8th, 2012 | by | screenwriting

Feb
08

A couple of years ago, screenwriter John August came up with an easy, straightforward way to incorporate script excerpts into web pages and blogs and forum posts. With a little simple formatting, plain text would be automatically formatted to look like a screenplay. John called it Scrippets.

I thought that was a cool idea, so I put support for it in Fade In.

Read full story

Notes on Screenplay Markdown

August 13th, 2011 | by | screenwriting

Aug
13

(Or, rather, Some Longish and Somewhat Technical Notes on Screenplay Markdown.)

Stu Maschwitz recently wrote about using Markdown syntax for screenplay formatting. Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for writing for the web, originally designed by John Gruber a few years back and now not uncommon as a formatting aid in online forums and other software.

Read full story

Mobile screenwriting

July 10th, 2011 | by | screenwriting

Jul
10

I’ve spent the last couple of months, in between working on new film projects, on getting the mobile version of Fade In ready for release — mainly working around different platform behaviours and toolkit shortcomings.

Read full story

© 2013 Kent Tessman

▲ Back to top