Besides (attempting) novels, I write screenplays. Some of them have done quite well in screenplay competitions, winning a few and consistently making it to the finals. Just thought I'd throw that out there so you could assess my bono fides.
Anyhow, I own a genuine licensed copy of Final Draft, probably the industry standard for screenwriting software. Expensive, too, at a MSRP of $250 USD, though you can install it on up to two machines per license. I use FD to produce the, well, final draft of my screenplays for submission, either in PDF or on paper.
I WRITE, however, using a mixed bag of software. Sometimes Scrivener, which can output a FD-format file, though mostly in LibreOffice Writer. I have a template I wrote, complete with formatting hotkeys running macros, that duplicates the functionality of Final Draft. The problem comes when I move from LO Writer to FD, or vice-versa.
A little background here: screenplays are written in a fixed-pitch font like Courier, 10 characters per inch, so as to maintain the general rule-of-thumb that one page of text translates to roughly one minute of screen time. Feature-length movie screenplays therefore run somewhere from 90 to 120 pages, give or take. Anything outside this range is pretty much dropped in the trash can by studio readers. It's not fair, but that's the way it is.
Anyhow, with the margins and spacings in my LO Writer template set EXACTLY to the standard FD settings, the text of a 120-page screenplay in Final Draft will expand to 130 pages when brought over to LO Writer.
I've known about this discrepancy for years. One of those minor irritations. Granted, it works in the "good" way -- I'd much rather have the screenplay shrink a few pages when I export it to FD, rather than get LARGER. However, I'm trying to migrate over to LO Writer full-time, as the version of FD I own has issues with Win 10 (hell, even I have issues with Win 10), and FD is for Mac and Windows only. No Linux version (yeah, it might run with WINE, but I'm not that great of a Linux geek), and I'm trying to move over to Ubuntu for the majority of my work.
So today, after a little investigating, I've discovered that FD actually "cheats" like a student trying to fudge on the length of a term paper. Rather than making short material look longer, they go the opposite way. They have their own Courier font, where the spacing between the lines (I think the term is called "leading") is about half of what the normal Courier fonts use. The result is that they can get two to four more lines of text per page.
So now my options are to:
A: copy the FD font over to my Linux machines (I paid for the license, plus it has to be available for embedding in PDF files, so it's NOT stealing);
B: hunt down a "tighter" Courier font on the net somewhere;
or:
C: Download a font editor from somewhere and customize the open-source Courier 10 font for tighter leading.
I don't want to lose that 10-page advantage when I'm getting near the end of a screenplay.
Beanbag
Anyhow, I own a genuine licensed copy of Final Draft, probably the industry standard for screenwriting software. Expensive, too, at a MSRP of $250 USD, though you can install it on up to two machines per license. I use FD to produce the, well, final draft of my screenplays for submission, either in PDF or on paper.
I WRITE, however, using a mixed bag of software. Sometimes Scrivener, which can output a FD-format file, though mostly in LibreOffice Writer. I have a template I wrote, complete with formatting hotkeys running macros, that duplicates the functionality of Final Draft. The problem comes when I move from LO Writer to FD, or vice-versa.
A little background here: screenplays are written in a fixed-pitch font like Courier, 10 characters per inch, so as to maintain the general rule-of-thumb that one page of text translates to roughly one minute of screen time. Feature-length movie screenplays therefore run somewhere from 90 to 120 pages, give or take. Anything outside this range is pretty much dropped in the trash can by studio readers. It's not fair, but that's the way it is.
Anyhow, with the margins and spacings in my LO Writer template set EXACTLY to the standard FD settings, the text of a 120-page screenplay in Final Draft will expand to 130 pages when brought over to LO Writer.
I've known about this discrepancy for years. One of those minor irritations. Granted, it works in the "good" way -- I'd much rather have the screenplay shrink a few pages when I export it to FD, rather than get LARGER. However, I'm trying to migrate over to LO Writer full-time, as the version of FD I own has issues with Win 10 (hell, even I have issues with Win 10), and FD is for Mac and Windows only. No Linux version (yeah, it might run with WINE, but I'm not that great of a Linux geek), and I'm trying to move over to Ubuntu for the majority of my work.
So today, after a little investigating, I've discovered that FD actually "cheats" like a student trying to fudge on the length of a term paper. Rather than making short material look longer, they go the opposite way. They have their own Courier font, where the spacing between the lines (I think the term is called "leading") is about half of what the normal Courier fonts use. The result is that they can get two to four more lines of text per page.
So now my options are to:
A: copy the FD font over to my Linux machines (I paid for the license, plus it has to be available for embedding in PDF files, so it's NOT stealing);
B: hunt down a "tighter" Courier font on the net somewhere;
or:
C: Download a font editor from somewhere and customize the open-source Courier 10 font for tighter leading.
I don't want to lose that 10-page advantage when I'm getting near the end of a screenplay.
Beanbag
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