Files
Exporting and printing
Making a PDF, a Word document or a Final Draft file from a screenplay, and printing it.
makes a copy of the screenplay in another format:
An export is a copy for someone else, or for another program. It is not a
save: the screenplay stays the .fountain file it was, and later changes go
there, not to the export. Calmly Script never saves over an exported file.
The PDF is the printed screenplay: Courier 12 on the paper chosen in Settings (see Paper size), with the page breaks, (MORE) and (CONT’D), page numbers and cover page described in How pages are counted. It is exactly what the Preview shows.
Your notes, synopses and boneyard text are not in it: they are for you, not for the reader. Neither are sections in a screenplay; in the other document types they are the acts or chapters, and they print.
On Android, PDF export goes through the system’s print dialog: choose Save as PDF as the printer there.
Printing
, or Ctrl+P⌘P, prints the same pages as the PDF: the screenplay as it should be printed, not the text as you see it while writing. What leaves the app is the same whether you print or export.
Word
The Word document is set to the same numbers as the PDF, Courier 12 on the same paper, and it has the same pages: each one starts where the PDF’s does, with the same (MORE) and (CONT’D), so page 47 of the Word document is page 47 of the PDF. The page numbers are in the header, and the title page is a page of its own. As in the PDF, notes, synopses and boneyard text are left out, and so are sections, except in the document types where they are acts or chapters.
Final Draft
The Final Draft file carries every line with its Final Draft element: scene heading (with its scene number), action, character, parenthetical, dialogue, transition, lyrics (Final Draft’s Lyrics) and centred text. Bold, italics and underlining go across as Final Draft’s own formatting, on the title page too, and a page break you typed makes the next line start a new page. Two page breaks in a row leave a blank page, as they do in the PDF.
The file brings its own element settings, so Final Draft sets each element where the PDF does — the same margins, scene headings, characters and transitions in capitals, lyrics in italics — rather than with whatever template is open on the computer that reads it. The title page is laid out as in the PDF: the title block a third of the way down, the contact details at the foot.
The space goes across as well: the lines of one paragraph stay one under the other, and where you left more blank lines than the format gives, the paragraph has that much room above it in Final Draft.
Final Draft is the one format with a place for what you write to yourself, so
nothing of it is lost: each note ([[ ]]) becomes a Final Draft script note on
the line it is in, and so does boneyard text (/* */). A note on the title
page becomes a script note that belongs to no line.
Sections and synopses become Final Draft’s own outline: a section is an Outline 1, 2 or 3 element at its level (a deeper section is an Outline 3, the deepest Final Draft has), and a synopsis a Summary. Final Draft lists them in its outline and structure views and, like Calmly Script, does not print them. It would print them if they were shown in the script, so the file opens with them hidden; View › Hide Outline in Script shows them.
A section called Beat Board goes to Final Draft’s Beat Board instead: each
section under it is a card with that title, and the synopses under that
section are the card’s lines. A section titled with an ellipsis (## …) is a
card with no title. This is how a Beat Board comes in from Final Draft, so it
goes back the same way.
Final Draft decides its own page breaks, but it is given the same paper, margins and columns, and Calmly Script breaks pages by Final Draft’s rules, so a screenplay comes out with the same pages in both. A sitcom, a stage play or a manuscript goes in Final Draft’s own templates for them, with its acts or chapters as Final Draft’s, and comes out with the same pages too.
If the export cannot be written
If a PDF is open in another program (Adobe Acrobat, for instance), the file cannot be replaced until you close it there, and Calmly Script says so. Close it and export again, or choose another name.