Screenwriting on a Mac
I've been trying to complete my Great Movie Script for a while now, and one of my excuses for the lack of progress has been the state of screenwriting software for the Mac. Well, free software, to be precise: I don't want to shell out a couple of hundred for Final Draft just yet, it'd be too much like inviting failure.
I tried this "free" Word template that I had already paid for with my TV licence fee money, but typically for a forced purchase, it doesn't work very well on the Mac version of Word, and the Beeb have no plans to improve said compatibility (I suppose there's only so much you can do with a few billion pounds, after all, and Israel-bashing doesn't come cheap; one must prioritise). And then there's the fact that it's for Word. Yuck.
I had been wishing that someone would do a plugin for my favourite editor, BBEdit, when ironically enough I discovered that someone had done just that for the Other Mac Editor, namely TextMate. And I'm starting to think that TextMate is pretty good for HTML editing as well: I'm loving the tab-completion feature.
Of course TextMate isn't free: but if I buy it for web editing, then the screen stuff comes free, right? Only I'll have to come up with another excuse for not writing. Either that or finish the script.
I tried this "free" Word template that I had already paid for with my TV licence fee money, but typically for a forced purchase, it doesn't work very well on the Mac version of Word, and the Beeb have no plans to improve said compatibility (I suppose there's only so much you can do with a few billion pounds, after all, and Israel-bashing doesn't come cheap; one must prioritise). And then there's the fact that it's for Word. Yuck.
I had been wishing that someone would do a plugin for my favourite editor, BBEdit, when ironically enough I discovered that someone had done just that for the Other Mac Editor, namely TextMate. And I'm starting to think that TextMate is pretty good for HTML editing as well: I'm loving the tab-completion feature.
Of course TextMate isn't free: but if I buy it for web editing, then the screen stuff comes free, right? Only I'll have to come up with another excuse for not writing. Either that or finish the script.
Labels: bbc, screenwriting, textmate
posted by Stephen West at 12:12 pm
4 Comments:
Stephen - it isn't free, but have you seen Scrivener?
http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html
Wow, thanks, that does look pretty cool! I love the corkboard; I use paper index cards a lot to plan structure (following Terry Rossio and Ted Elliott's writing style) and so that would be great, to have it integrated. I'll definitely give that a go. (Another excuse not to write! Yay!)
Have you had a look at www.celtx.com ?
It's free, open source and has more features than any other screenwriting software I've used before.
Also very impressive. This calls for an extensive feature comparison, I think. Could consume weeks of writing time!
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