Fade In Pro -- tips, feedback, requested features

Collapse

Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • #31
    Re: Fade In Pro -- tips, feedback, requested features

    Originally posted by Xenakis View Post
    Is Fade In Pro fully Unicode compliant?
    Fade In handles Unicode, yes. It's the only pro screenwriting software (of Fade In, Final Draft, and MM Screenwriter) that does.

    Comment


    • #32
      Re: Fade In Pro -- tips, feedback, requested features

      Anybody looking for an alternative American English dictionary, I'm currently trying this one:

      http://extensions.libreoffice.org/ex...s-dictionaries

      And it seems better than the default one (although it flags words like EXT., but those can be easily added to the custom dictionary). There are also British and Canadian versions.
      Last edited by ; 05-23-2013, 08:05 AM.

      Comment


      • #33
        Re: Fade In Pro -- tips, feedback, requested features

        Is there a way to add headers? I'm writing a sitcom and that's the only thing I haven't figured out how to do.
        what the head makes cloudy the heart makes very clear

        Comment


        • #34
          Re: Fade In Pro -- tips, feedback, requested features

          From the Help file:

          Page Numbering
          Page numbers can be formatted under Document > Page Numbers. When specifying the page number format, use # to stand in for the actual page number, * for the name of the current revision, and @ for the current date. To include a literal placeholder instead of what it represents, put a backslash (\) before it.

          For instance, "@ * revisions Page\# #" will produce a page number that looks something like: "Jan 1 2013 Blue revisions Page# 10"

          You can also use the field placeholders {Title}, {Subtitle}, {Writtenby}, {Revision}, {Page}, and {Pages} as well as date formatting such as {yy-mm-dd}, {d-m-yyyy}, or {mmm. d, yyyy}.
          Last edited by ; 07-18-2013, 12:20 PM.

          Comment


          • #35
            Re: Fade In Pro -- tips, feedback, requested features

            Originally posted by Dr. Vergerus View Post
            From the Help file:
            Don't know why I didn't see that, thanks.
            what the head makes cloudy the heart makes very clear

            Comment


            • #36
              Re: Fade In Pro -- tips, feedback, requested features

              Originally posted by Fade In Pro View Post
              Fade In handles Unicode, yes. It's the only pro screenwriting software (of Fade In, Final Draft, and MM Screenwriter) that does.
              What is the significance of handling Unicode - does it mean more than cross-platform compatibility?
              "Friends make the worst enemies." Frank Underwood

              Comment


              • #37
                Re: Fade In Pro -- tips, feedback, requested features

                I guess it has to do with handling special characters and some languages. For instance, in Spanish we have "ñ" and accents (is that how they are called in English?) "á, é, í, ó, ú". Movie Magic supported these characters while writing, but when importing from txt or rtf they were replaced ñ->n, ó->o, etc.

                Question: does anybody know how to insert a nonbreaking hyphen in Fade In? Thanks.
                Last edited by ComicBent; 07-19-2013, 08:34 AM. Reason: non-breakind -> nonbreaking

                Comment


                • #38
                  Re: Fade In Pro -- tips, feedback, requested features

                  Originally posted by DavidK View Post
                  What is the significance of handling Unicode - does it mean more than cross-platform compatibility?
                  It does. The other professional screenwriting applications have what's called single-byte (or sometimes ASCII) character support. This is a technical limitation that means there are just over 200 usable glyphs or letters/characters that the application can possibly store in a document, display onscreen, and print to paper or PDF. As a result, an application has to use a particular "encoding", or mapping of glyphs to those available places. In contrast, Unicode (as of version 6.0) has 109,384 assigned "code points".

                  Legacy screenwriting programs can generally give you A-Z, a-z, 0-9, and simple punctuation - sometimes with basic Western European accented characters and a few additional punctuation marks thrown in. (All of which is also dependent on the actual glyph coverage of the font being used; things may also be inconsistent between what is typed and what is shown on screen and what is printed/saved to PDF.) So lack of Unicode may be fine if you're writing screenplays in English, and you may also be able to more or less get by for certain European languages.

                  But if you want to write something (either a single line of dialogue or a whole screenplay) in another language like Russian or Chinese or Hindi or Thai, you're going to run into trouble using a single-byte application. (Final Draft, for instance, has called these "foreign fonts" and told users that they're unsupported.) Previously much non-English screenwriting was done in Microsoft Word; today people can and do use Fade In.

                  The fact is that today we live in a Unicode world, and it's fairly surprising to see an application from the last ten years or more that doesn't have at least basic Unicode support. The increasing internationalization of film financing, production, and distribution means that use of languages other than English is growing. One Fade In user, for instance, was working on a co-production with China and sending scripts back and forth in English and Chinese for translation. Another used a modified template to do side-by-side translated dialogue in multiple languages for an entire script.

                  That's (part of) the benefit of Unicode.

                  (A technical benefit of a Unicode-aware application may simply be divorcing how the application handles layout and display from a particular font. Many users of legacy programs have run into issues where changing the font or printer(!) will throw off and sometimes completely mangle layout - putting line and page breaks in different places, wildly changing line spacing, producing output that doesn't quite look like it did on screen, etc. While better layout isn't a quality of Unicode per se, a Unicode-aware application probably has to be smarter in its layout architecture in order to deal properly with the huge variability inherent to Unicode support.)

                  Comment


                  • #39
                    Re: Fade In Pro -- tips, feedback, requested features

                    Originally posted by Dr. Vergerus View Post
                    Question: does anybody know how to insert a nonbreaking hyphen in Fade In? Thanks.
                    There's no shortcut at the moment - that might be an oversight.

                    I did just try pasting in a Unicode non-breaking hyphen from

                    http://www.fileformat.info/info/unic...2011/index.htm

                    but I didn't like how it appeared for the font in question (probably because that Unicode character isn't covered by the font I'm using, so it's being font-substituted). Potentially the smarter thing to do is translate that during layout into the glyph for a standard hyphen. I'll look at the best way to do this.

                    Comment


                    • #40
                      Re: Fade In Pro -- tips, feedback, requested features

                      Thanks. Usually it's done through ctrl + hyphen, I think.

                      I don't often use non-breaking hyphens, but the other day I got the word "Jell-O" broken at the end of a line (easily fixed inserting a manual line break before). By the way, I've noticed that when typing two hyphens after a word , if they need to go in the next line Fade In automatically takes the previous word to the next line too (sorry for the poor explanation.) I hadn't noticed this before but I think it's excellent. I don't remember MMS or FD doing this.
                      Last edited by ; 07-19-2013, 02:32 PM.

                      Comment


                      • #41
                        Re: Fade In Pro -- tips, feedback, requested features

                        Thanks. Usually it's done through ctrl + hyphen, I think.
                        In Word it is Ctrl+Shift hyphen.

                        In my nonfiction work I use Word, and I use nonbreaking hyphens and nonbreaking spaces fairly often. I hate to see something like *Mrs. Smith* with *Mrs.* at the end of a line and *Smith* as the first word on the next. This happens a lot, so I use a nonbreaking space.

                        For those who maybe care ... You can insert a Unicode character into a Word document fairly easily. The font has got to contain the character, or you will get a substituted font, and it will look truly dreadful (Word substitutes the horrible-looking MS Mincho on my computer). Times and Arial contain a lot of the Unicode glyphs (characters), as do some of the high-quality Open Source free fonts like Gentium, DejaVu, and various other really nice fonts.

                        To insert a Unicode character in Word: Type the hexadecimal code (it may be a combination of numbers and letters). Immediately after the code (no space), type ALT+X. This will change the code into the corresponding glyph/character. You do not have to use the numeric keyboard for this; the regular number keys are fine.

                        Interestingly, you can toggle back and forth between the code and the glyph by using ALT+X.

                        For example, to insert a nonbreaking hyphen in Word, you can either use the Ctrl+Shift Hyphen key combination, or you can type 2011 and then ALT+X.

                        "The fact that you have seen professionals write poorly is no reason for you to imitate them." - ComicBent.

                        Comment


                        • #42
                          Re: Fade In Pro -- tips, feedback, requested features

                          I've just checked in LibreOffice Writer, and it too works with ctrl+shift+hyphen and ctrl+shift+space.

                          Comment


                          • #43
                            Re: Fade In Pro -- tips, feedback, requested features

                            Originally posted by Dr. Vergerus View Post
                            Question: does anybody know how to insert a nonbreaking hyphen in Fade In? Thanks.
                            Next update, hopefully by tomorrow night.

                            Comment


                            • #44
                              Re: Fade In Pro -- tips, feedback, requested features

                              Great! Thanks.

                              Comment


                              • #45
                                Re: Fade In Pro -- tips, feedback, requested features

                                (Sorry - took a few days longer than I expected to get everything tidied up, but the latest update is now available with Control/Cmd+Shift+space/hyphen.)

                                Comment

                                Working...
                                X