Fade In Pro -- tips, feedback, requested features

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

    Originally posted by Dr. Vergerus View Post
    The default American English dictionary in Fade In seems to flag a lot of words that are in fact spelled correctly, though. I'm having much better results with the one from Mozilla which I've got from this link in your site: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/language-tools
    Interesting - I'll take a look at that. Anything in particular I should be on the lookout for? (I've never noticed any serious deficiencies with the existing en_US dictionary personally, but my vocabulary may just be woefully limited.)

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

      For instance, several names the dictionary considered correctly spelled were flagged when adding apostrophe + s to form the possesive (I've studied this as the Saxon Genitive, but I don't know if you natives call it by a different name). Examples of this I can remember are Nathan/Nathan's and Lynn/Lynn's. It's not a problem with all names.

      The day I tried the Mozilla dictionary, I had a page in front of me with six or seven words wrongly flagged by the default dictionary; after I installed the one from Mozilla, all of them were recognized as correct.

      I wish I had written down some of the more common mistakes. There have been enough of them that I've tried to use other dictionaries in the past. I tried some from LibreOffice, but the one from Mozilla seems to be the best so far.

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

        Dr. V,

        As for the Saxon genitive, it is better if we just refer to this as the possessive. That is the term that most people are familiar with. It is also known as the genitive case. The Saxon part is probably some carryover from nineteenth- or early twentieth-century linguistics. However, your use of the term is correct. I looked it up, since I had never heard it before.

        I have never yet seen a spelling checker ("spellcheck") that worked really well. Or, to put it another way, they sometimes work too well by flagging correct items that are just suspicious. The apostrophe will likely always cause problems.

        (Sorry to quit abruptly here ... but I am having a chronic internet problem that sometimes occurs, almost always late at night. When I type, it takes up to a second for each character to appear. It is maddening.)
        Last edited by ComicBent; 05-03-2014, 10:41 PM.

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

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

          I don't know that I'd prefer a spellchecker that flagged suspicious words. Would this be something like what MS Word does with words depending on the context (they're underlined in blue, I think)?

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

            I don't know that I'd prefer a spellchecker that flagged suspicious words.
            Dr. V ... My point is that the spellcheckers tend to give a lot of false positives ("I think it might be misspelled; I don't know for sure, but I'll flag it.")

            I think it is better to have that drawback than a situation in which an incorrect spelling is overlooked.

            The most important things in a spellchecker are:
            1. It should have the ability to learn words.
            2. You should be able to transfer your dictionary to a another computer when you install that program onto a new computer. I have had to reteach dictionaries too many times.
            For any person who is a good speller, the spellchecker is really just a way to check for typos. I always turn the spellchecker off. If I have something important going out, I will run the spellchecker over it to check for typos, and in a long document I will have a few.

            Capitalization, plurals, and apostrophes seem to be the worst problem areas (aside from just not having some words in the dictionary).

            You end up having to teach the dictionary a lot of words that are brands with unusual spellings. Maybe iPod would be flagged (it was not just now when I typed it here, but iPad and iMac were both flagged).

            I have seen spellcheckers that would recognize the singular but not the plural. Fortunately, this seems to be less the case nowadays.

            Words with apostrophes are a nightmare. The first problem is that a huge number of people form the common plural with singular+'s instead of singular+s. This is not a typo when they do it, even though they do not do it all the time. Spellcheckers will miss almost all of these mistakes, because book's is a legitimate spelling for the possessive of the singular book.

            As for the problem of a possessive like Nathan's, the first question is whether the dictionary recognized Nathan. If not, then it will not recognize the possessive.

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

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

              I misunderstood your previous post; I thought you meant you'd like a spellchecker to flag suspicious words (what you've written is clear but I was watching something on the TV at the same time).

              And yes, being able to export the user dictionary would be a great feature. I don't know if Fade In can do this. Probably you can manually copy the file from somewhere within the installation folder.

              Nathan and Lynn were recognized as properly spelled; Nathan's and Lynn's were flagged.

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

                @FadeInPro: I've found a bug (unless I'm doing something wrong). I've modified the Dialogue element so that, when I press Tab, the next element will be Character, while the behavior after Enter stays the same (goes to Action). The problem is that when I press Tab it sends me to Action; the only time Tab sends me to a new Character element is when the Dialogue paragraph is blank.

                I'm using Fade In 1.2.473 on Windows 7 Ultimate.

                The reason for this change in the default behavior of Tab in the Character element is to replicate the default behavior in Movie Magic Screenwriter, which I've always found more convenient than the one in Final Draft. To properly reproduce the behavior of MMS, it would be needed that Fade In could automatically jump to Parenthetical when typing "(" within a Dialogue paragraph. Is this possible? Would you be open to consider this feature?

                Last, a feature request: I'd like to somehow be able to block the ability to add additional blank lines by repeatedly pressing Enter. The reason is that I've mistakenly introduced blank lines a few times, and when they occur at a page break I sometimes don't notice them until I edit something in the previous pages and then this extra white line fall somewhere more visible in the page.

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

                  In advance, sorry for the detour from FIP features, but it's a footnote to the dictionary issue: In MM, there is no "ignore all, now and forever in this doc" for any purposely (or purposefully; here, take your pick) misspelled words.

                  For example, let's say I have a character say "Nooo!" If I click "ignore" during a spell check, that ignore will last only as long the current session; if I close MM, that ignore isn't there when I reopen the file.

                  However, I can (!!!) add "Nooo" permanently to the dictionary - which, I definitely do nottt want to do.

                  Those are the only two choices.

                  I spoke with someone at MM tech support about this last week and his reaction was: The way MM does it is normal. (Though, since they pay him, I suppose that's to be expected.)

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

                    I don't know, Dr. V ... I would have to parse through the implications of the Tab/Enter thing.

                    I have always liked the principles, in various programs, of:

                    (1) At end of Dialogue: Enter --> Action or Character (your option).
                    (2) At start of Action: Tab --> Character.
                    (3) At start of Dialogue: Tab --> Parenthetical.
                    I also like the ability to use a parenthetical in dialogue that is not a style parenthetical, just a regular parenthetical. That makes me hesitant about the automatic parenthetical behavior when you hit *(*. Sophocles had this, and it was one of the few things that I did not like about the program.
                    As for disallowing multiple blank lines ... I would want any change to be an option, not a rigid change.

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

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

                      Well, the behavior of the Parenthetical element can be defined by the user in MMS, as you sure know; it can behave like in Fade In or Final Draft, which is the way you described, or it can behave like I've said, which is the default behavior in MMS. That's how it should be in Fade In, ideally.

                      I don't know it this is easy or hard to implement, and it certainly is not a must-have feature, but it would make some of us MMS user feel more at home in Fade In. Maybe it is because Screenwriter 2000 was the first screenwriting application I've ever used, but this behavior of Tab in Dialogue to go to a new Character element is the most intuitive to me; having to press Enter and then Tab isn't that big of a hassle, but I do find it uncomfortable.

                      And I didn't mean that the user wouldn't be allowed to enter a series of blank lines if he wanted to, just that one could disable this capability (double-clicking Enter). Actually, Final Draft and MMS let you enter blank lines at will by pressing Shift+Enter, while double-clicking Enter brings up a styles or elements menu with quick shortcuts; I find this preferable, but we've spoken about this before and I think the developer of Fade In feels strongly that the way Fade In currently works is better. What I've suggested would mean that somewhere in the options in Fade In you could check a box to disable adding extra blank lines by repeatedly pressing Enter; those who are happy with the current behavior wouldn't notice any difference.

                      And since I'm in such demanding mood, here goes another feature request: user-defined keyboard shortcuts for the different styles. I'd much rather use Alt and character combinations than Alt and number.

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

                        Since you mentioned Sophocles, the 2007 beta that's still somewhere online makes the nicest-looking PDFs I've seen. The font is Courier Std, which I think it's the same MMS uses for PDFs, but here looks crisper.

                        It's too bad the developer didn't release the code so the Open Software community could take over and continue developing Sophocles. I was never a user, but it's not hard to see why so many loved it.

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

                          Dr. V ...

                          I have the last build of the Sophocles program (2.0.0.65).

                          Sophocles had an "Export to PDF" function. When I use the "Export to PDF" function now, I get Courier New as the font. Maybe Courier Std was the default font for the PDF, if that font was installed on a user's system. I do not know. But I do not remember that it was installed as part of the program.

                          I never used the Export to PDF function. Instead I used a third-party driver and Courier10 BT or one its clones.

                          With Sophocles you could use any font that you wanted for display on the screen, but you could select any other font for the printed (hard copy) font.

                          I suspect that the PDF with Courier Std employed that font because the user had chosen it as the output font. It produces a nice printout if you do not like darker fonts. It prints out very similar to Courier New. However, the screen display is not as well-hinted as Courier New.

                          By the way, with Sophocles you could take a font like Courier10 BT or one of its clones, and adjust the line leading with great subtlety.

                          Sophocles had a different user interface, and you had a little learning curve with it. But it was not difficult, just different.

                          Yes, I wish that Tim Sheehan had released Sophocles to the open-source community. I suspect that someone bought him out just to get him off the field as a player. He disappeared without a word.

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

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

                            That's the same build I've installed, ComicBent. I've made no changes to the default configuration and I don't have CourierStd installed in my computer. In the options in Sophocles, it's identified as the default font; if you click "Restore Default Font," you'll get Courier (if you'd previously selected any other, that is).

                            In the properties of the PDF file, the font is identified as follows:

                            Courier
                            Type: Type 1
                            Code: Ansi
                            Real font: CourierStd
                            Type of real font: Type 1

                            The interface is certainly different. I think MMS6 does a better job at having a ton of features yet being fairly simple for the user to find and adjust the settings to his licking. If I remember correctly, the idea was that, once released, there would have been several versions of Sophocles 2007 with different levels of functionality, the beta being the most full-featured; too full-featured for me, I think.

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

                              Originally posted by Dr. Vergerus View Post
                              @FadeInPro: I've found a bug (unless I'm doing something wrong). I've modified the Dialogue element so that, when I press Tab, the next element will be Character, while the behavior after Enter stays the same (goes to Action). The problem is that when I press Tab it sends me to Action; the only time Tab sends me to a new Character element is when the Dialogue paragraph is blank.

                              I'm using Fade In 1.2.473 on Windows 7 Ultimate.
                              I have the reciprocal bug. (FIP 1.2.473 - Windows 7 Home Premium). I modified the Dialogue element to TAB=Action and Enter=Character. The Enter works, the Tab gives me Character again. CTRL keys work as designed. FWIW, mine are imported .fdx files created by Adobe Story CC (a very time-saving and elegant switch, BTW. I'm a happy user.)

                              Thanks!

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

                                @graybooks: with the settings you've described, have you tried pressing Tab in a blank Dialogue element? Does it work as expected, as is my case?

                                Welcome to the DDP message board.

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