I’ve been meaning to trade up on my screenwriting software for some time. My old burned copy of Final Draft can’t do .pdf conversions, and Adobe’s own site doesn’t know what to do with old Final Draft files. Enough industry people have moved away from Final Draft that I’ve had to resort to sending that most lethally un-serious of file formats – the .rtf.
And now that my CD/DVD drive on my old desktop has pretty much kicked the bucket, I can’t really do any screenwriting on this machine. The old version won’t allow me to edit or save without the CD, so the inevitable moment is here.
Still, I’ve tried to avoid shelling out $200-ish bucks for the new Final Draft out of the belief that someone must have made a good enough piece of cheap-or-freeware by now for screenplay formatting. Tentatively, it’s looking like I’m right. I’ve downloaded Celtx and, other than getting used to some slight interface and command changes, it’s working smoothly enough, and does .pdf conversions in a single click. I’m working on this corporate video script with it right now and having no trouble at all with it.
The real headache is my archive of other scripts. Celtx can’t import old Final Draft files – I have to convert them to .txt, and then Celtx does what it can with it, but it’s not totally accurate with how it differentiates character names from actions and so forth. Which means that turning each of my old scripts into Celtx files is going to take a couple of hours’ work. It’s worth it in the long-run, but it is annoying enough with the other work I’m trying to do right now.
Still, an opportunity arose out of the blue on Friday to put an old script of mine in the hands of someone with the money to make it and the desire to make something like it genre-wise imminently. They have requested a .pdf. So, where there’s a will there’s a way, and I’m doing some old-fashioned un-glamorous layout work that’s going to keep me up late tonight.
As I say in the subject line – it is without question an improvement on the normal state of affairs, which is no one giving a damn what file format my scripts are sitting un-filmed and un-purchased on my hard drive in.