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Screenplay formatting

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Eric James Stone:
I've been working on a screenplay, and I thought I'd share a resource I've found.

Screenplays require special formatting.  One option is to buy screenwriting software such as "Final Draft."  (I recommend against "Hollywood Screenwriter," for reasons I won't go into now.)

However, if you're not ready to spend the $190 or so for dedicated screenwriting software, here's an alternative I've found useful: "ScreenPro."  ScreenPro is a screenwriting template for Microsoft Word.  Basically, it adds all the proper formatting as "styles" in Word.  It has buttons you can push to choose between the character name style, the dialogue style, the action style, etc.  It also tries to guess what the next style should be (i.e., if you've just done the character name, the next line is probably dialogue), and if it's wrong you can use the tab key to cycle through styles to find the one you want.

ScreenPro is shareware, which means you can test it out for free.  If you like it, registration is only $8.50.

Oldie Black Witch:
That's a really great price for screenplay software. Final Draft is the de-facto industry standard right now, but it is extremely expensive.

I wouldn't recommend Hollywood Screenwriter either, but very likely for entirely different reasons.

Parker:
The one we used in my BYU screenwriting class was "Movie Magic Screenwriter," which I liked quite a bit, and it was only like $75, if I recall correctly.  Is this the same thing you guys are referring to as "Hollywood Screenwriter"?  If so, what didn't you like about that one?

Eric James Stone:
Maybe that was a student discount?  The manufacturer's retail price for Movie Magic Screenwriter is over $200, although Amazon has it for only $160.

The biggest thing I hate about Hollywood Screenwriter (a different program, but from the makers of Movie Magic Screenwriter) is that it's copy-protected to require that the CD-ROM be in the drive when you run it.  For someone like me, who writes on three different computers (home, work, laptop), that basically makes the program unusable.  (I even used CD-ROM drive emulation software to try to make it possible to just run it off a hard drive image of the CD-ROM, but it didn't work right.)

A lesser issue is that I'm used to writing in a true WYSIWYG environment, and Hollywood Screenwriter doesn't offer that.  It uses
========================================
to indicate page breaks.

Parker:
Yeah--it must have been a student discount.  And I seem to remember having that same requirement--to have the CD in when you're writing.  Since I mainly use one computer as a "home base," it wasn't that big of a deal.

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