There are other features I wish Final Draft had, such as XML export for the web, a clipping bin, and less-aggressive Smart Lists. That way, you have all the options of the print dialog box, and you’re guaranteed to get just what the printer would.
That may be new for Windows, but if you’re using Mac OS X, I’d highly recommend using “Print…” and “Save to. Each of these has free demo versions.įinal Draft 7 is apparently better at exporting. In my opinion, better choices for outlining are Omni Outliner and Pyramid. Scenes aren’t Legos, and they can’t be flopped around willy-nilly. While in theory it would be great to reorganize your script just by moving some cards around, real life screenplays never work that way.
If you make a selection in one panel that extends into the region shown in the other panel, the program freaks out. Final Draft runs into familiar problems with this setup. Many Mac programs - including Microsoft Word - have had split windows for over a decade.
Splitting the screen is helpful, but hardly revolutionary. On a big screen, keeping the left panel open to the scene navigator lets me click through to specific sections quickly. You can show one of the panels in scene-navigator view, or as index cards - which can now have two sides. One nice new feature is the ability to split a document window, so you can see two parts of the script at the same time. It doesn’t choke on the previous version’s files, which is a problem I’ve encountered every previous integer-level upgrade. It hasn’t quit on me, and it hasn’t had the same refusing-to-launch problem the last version had. On the plus side, the new version is stable. This past month, Final Draft came out with version 7.0, which was the first major update in a while. My screenwriting software of choice has long been Final Draft, which is 90% great, 10% maddening and significantly better than any of the other programs I’ve tried - and believe me, I’ve tried a bunch.