ASK & DISCUSS INDEX

11 years, 8 months ago - Peter Ward

Regarding the page layout problem, you change the paper size (on Windows at any rate) from ctrl+P > Properties > Paper/Quality.

If you think the CD is bad, have you tried "deactivating" one of your copies so you can reuse the serial number and installing the trial version from the Final Draft website?

I gotta tell you FD8 is super buggy, and I far as I can tell they never update it.

-Peter

11 years, 8 months ago - Alnoor Dewshi

Hmm, that is strange. If you're on a mac, try trashing your prefs file & update to the latest version of Final Draft as Peter suggests.

The element formatting is part of the .fdx doc. You're welcome to email me a copy and I can check how it behaves on my system.

Otherwise, I must say Final Draft support have been pretty good at emailing back in my experience; hope they'll be able to help out soon.

11 years, 8 months ago - Stephen M. Hunt

Hello Alnoor

Thanks for responding.

I did as you said but not matter what number spacing I selected, it made no difference, it always jumps three lines.

I'm pretty sure the problem is the FD8 CD as I get the exactly the same problem on my laptop and desktop.

Another problem is that the page layout is always European A4 rather than American page layout. This surprised me as, after all, FD is American and I haven't changed any settings - wouldn't dare.

Several screenwriting competitions (fortunately, not all of them) have dumped my script for poor formatting because of this A4 / American page layout problem.

Thanks again and if there's anything I can ever help you with (obviously not technical) just let me know.

Best wishes, Steve

11 years, 8 months ago - Peter Spencer

Why should you have to mess around with 'settings' ? For the money it costs, FD should just work straight off the shelf... It's always been horrible and buggy and I only use it under sufferance - what drives me mad is the people who come on here - or on blogs or twitter banging on about it being 'industry standard' make me laugh because just like the film business over here it is industry standard - messy and random and unpredictable.....it's extremely poor

11 years, 8 months ago - Stephen M. Hunt

I had no luck changing paper size as I was directed to printer seetings. No, I'm not on mac but on windows and think that that might be the problem. I think my present windows is corrupt and so is causing me many problems including disrupting FD8. I completely agree that products should - as the old tv ad used to say - "do what it says on the tin". So Peter I like your comparison re FD8 and your industry experiences! If you only use FD8 under suffereance, are you using something else as well?

So now I have a brand new, full version of Windows 8 winging its way to me and am hoping that will do the trick - I'll keep you posted.

Since this time last year, I've been trying to get my first film made by entering Hollywood screenwriting competitions. Its been a messy, randon and unpredictable experience - yet on balance I've done well. I've racked up 21 achievments / placings ranging from nominations for Spotlight Awards all the way up to Grand Prize Winner, three wins and three finalist placings.

Formatting is always an issue in these competitions - as it should be. The last one I enterred is designed so that scripts with formatting problems do not progress to having the quality of their story assessed. The formatting section had a pretty low opinion of my formatting and wanted my script binned. The reader cited loads of issues including the fly page saying "writen by" not "by" and I wrote "sixteen foot moving truck" not "sixteen-foot moving truck."

But someone else in the competition over-ruled her and I'm now through to the third round which selects the semi-finalists.

My forte is story not formatting so I have used many script polish services to iron out my blunders. But they too are messy, random and unpredictable, meaning that they don't agree beween themselves as to to what is up to date, correct / incorrect. I'm happy to pay for script polishing but have yet to find someone who really knows all there is to know about today's formatting.

Meantime, thanks to everyone for their response(s) and best wishes, Steve

11 years, 8 months ago - Alnoor Dewshi

Check the menu: Format/Elements...
in the Paragraphs tab select Scene Heading, choose drop down menu Space Before: 2

Do you get this with a New Document?
If not, it may be a corrupt document.
Cut & paste the text into a New doc & use the Reformat tool to reformat.

11 years, 8 months ago - Stephen M. Hunt

Yes, Peter (above) alerted me to the paper size issue and that's a big issue for me as these days I set my stories in the States to be ptched to American companies / agents etc. But I'm at a loss as to how to set my laptop / desktop for USA letter size and hope installing the latest Windows 8 will help.

I don't use Mac - would that make a difference? You're saying you can only edit on your iPad?

11 years, 8 months ago - Franz von Habsburg FBKS MSc

PS Surprisingly I now use FD8 on my iPad to great effect for editing. Different but dead easy to learn and you save it periodically into Dropbox (in a special folder called FD Mobile) so that it is available instantly on your Mac.

11 years, 8 months ago - Franz von Habsburg FBKS MSc

Don't forget it's an American system and they don't use A4 as default so you need to change paper size as it's probably set to letter size which is slightly different, resulting in a different scrolling up to the next page. Also test by printing a few pages to see if it starts printing on the same line.