Wednesday, July 27, 2005

Yikes. When I delete a word in the middle of a line, sometimes the whole line's formatting changes. This is scary and tedious to fix.

My copy of Screenwriter is looking awfully attractive...

UPDATE: I went back to FD6, since I don't trust FD7 any more. That didn't fix the screwed-up formatting. So I copied the whole script into a new file. Wouldn't you know that scrambled the formatting up even worse? Which suggested that yes, the file may have been corrupted and was just waiting to blow up. So I got to spend the morning reformatting. That's real, real helpful when you're trying to do a crash feature rewrite in under ten days.

UPDATE 2: I talked with tech support at Final Draft. The problem seems to be that the macros FD uses to format text got screwed up. Beth at tech support blamed it on errant Word macros embedded in the text. I don't know how these would have got into the file, but I didn't originate the file, after all. I also don't know why FD doesn't strip these out when you paste into FD; that seems like asking for trouble.

Her suggestion was to export the file to text, then re-import, thus losing all my revision marks and scene numbers. Hell, if I want to do that, I may as well go to Screenwriter at the same time, huh?

8:19 AM

5 Comments:

Why not just switch back over to FD 6? I've been using FD 6 on Tiger and it's been working flawlessly, the only thing I'd grab from FD 7 is it's new TV Templates...

By  R. K. Bentley, at 1:07 PM  

After some headaches trying to get FD7 to be less hinky I went back to 6 as well -- and that's working fine.

Would've been nice to have the outlining and write-on notecards features though.

By  Steve Peterson, at 2:35 PM  

No kidding, FD 7 has more bugs than STARSHIP TROOPERS. I switched back to version 6, which works just fine for me. If it ain't broke...

By  Andy Diggle, at 6:34 AM  

Why this die-hard loyalty to FD- 0.whatever? I have MM Screenwriter 2000 - never upgraded, never downloaded any fixes. It's been sweet to me ever since I bought it 5 years ago. Working as an AD a while back, I would always recommend that the production use MMS because of its stability and, more importantly, its compatibility to Movie Magic Scheduling. The software is a solid platform when you're in trenches and has never let me down. I think FD just has better marketing behind it.

By  Script Demon, at 1:04 PM  

Seriously. Movie Magic. Get out of your abusive codependent relationship.

By  Unknown, at 8:35 PM  

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