Final Draft Script Formats (extras package) Version 0.1
What
This is a Scrivener extras package containing Final Draft script formats. Scrivener 1.1beta 1.06 or later is required.* Final Draft - Screenplay
Final Draft - Screenplay (Cole and Haag)
Final Draft - Screenplay (Warner Brothers)
Final Draft - BBC Screenplay
Final Draft - BBC Screenplay for TV
Why
These script formats help minimize the time we have to spend in Final Draft by making it easier to get our scripts out of Final Draft and into Scrivener.
How* Download the extras package attached to this message.
Run the package, which will install the script formats.
Save your Final Draft script as a Rich Text Format document.
Import that file into Scrivener.
Select the document in the Binder List.
Select the appropriate Script Mode from the Text->Scriptwriting menu item.
Bugs* The BBC formats are easily confused about elements. Many BBC elements share the exact same margins, and Scrivener only differentiates elements by margins (including top-margins). This produces ambiguous elements from Scrivener’s perspective. Even if Scrivener differentiated by capitalization rules (and justification and underline rules), Final Draft is ambiguous about capitalization in its RTF exports.
There are probably lots of Tab/Enter oddities. I’ll go over these as I add more formats.
I only use “Final Draft - Screenplay” myself, so I’ll need help fixing the others.
Quirks
Any “page break before paragraph” will be replaced with a “2 spaces before paragraph” since there’s no way to do that in Scrivener.
Future
Future releases will work towards a 1.0 that contain all of Final Draft 7’s “stationaries” of type “script”, correct Tab/Enter behavior, and perfect RTF imports where possible.
I realize this may be a fool’s errand because FD is so quirky about importing (even its own exports), and some of the elements may simply never survive the trip, but this effort may save time for some of us.
With the work Keith has already done to accommodate our tiny minority of screenwriters, and now that he’s in direct contact with FD developers trying to find new ways to make the Scrivener/FD integration even better, I figured the least I can do is maintain the FD formats for him.
I’ll be adding more of the formats over the next few days, and tweaking the Tab/Enter flows to match FD. In a lot of cases the more exotic formats may not permit perfect round-trips due to FD’s export/import limitations. Despite this, all of the formats should function as expected (with the exception of page-break dynamics) from within Scrivener due to Keith’s rather complete implementation.
Just browsing through the forums and noticed these Final Draft templates. I noticed that they were posted in July of 2007. Have the additions of Final Draft to Scrivener by Keith made these templates obsolete or are these more complete than what Keith has added to the program?
For integration with Final Draft you don’t really need to worry too much now that Scrivener has FCF support. You can just use the standard screenwriting format and export to FCF, then let Final Draft worry about the particulars of the element margins etc.
I believe these are obsolete now. I’ll take Keith’s advice and use Scrivener’s standard screenplay format with reliance on the baked-in FDX (or FCF) file format support for round-trips with Final Draft.
Actually these would still be useful if you were starting off in Scrivener and exporting to Final Draft as FDX later. However, you could just import a particular format from an FDX file that uses that format, which would ensure the format was identical to that used by Final Draft. (This assumes Final Draft 8 of course - FCF doesn’t support custom formats anyway.)
