Tips for ScriptMaker users

FREE Dark Courier font

CLICK HERE for a free font from Hewlett Packard that will give your screenplays that extra professional look. Unzip the files into a temporary folder and use the Font Installer under the Control Panel to install it in your system.

Other dictionaries for ScriptMaker 2

The spell-checker that comes with ScriptMaker 2 is capable of being configured to use dictionary files other than those supplied with the installation.

ScriptMaker can use any .DCT dictionary file supplied with Microsoft Word.

In addition, the following ZIP files contain dictionaries including some for foreign languages. I have not tested any of these but you are welcome to try them out.

afrdct.zip (517 KB) Afrikaans dictionary
american.zip (413 KB) Superior version of the American dictionary
aussie.zip (419 KB) Austrialian dictionary
british.zip (412 KB) Superior version of the British dictionary
danish.zip (408 KB) Danish dictionary
english.zip (410 KB) Superior version of the Base English dictionary
german.zip (461 KB) German dictionary
italian3.zip (468 KB) Italian dictionary
polish.zip (411 KB) Polish dictionary
spanish4.zip (419 KB) Spanish dictionary
swedish.zip (170 KB) Swedish dictionary

Instructions for installing dictionaries

1. Download and unzip the required archives into a temporary folder on your computer.
2. Copy the .DCT file(s) to the directory where you installed ScriptMaker.
3. When you invoke the spelling-checker, click on the Options button when it appears, and then click on Add.

IMPORTANT Where a ZIP archive contains more than one .DCT file, you should use ALL of them.

Creating PDFs with ScriptMaker

CutePDF can be used from within any application, including ScriptMaker, SLang or Storyboard Tools. Essentially CutePDF installs a printer driver in your system which allows you to "print" to a PDF.

Exporting to Final Draft™

It is perfectly possible to port your ScriptMaker scripts to Final Draft ^TM. To do this you need to do the following:

1. From with ScriptMaker, export the script to RTF format.
2. From within Microsoft Word™ open the RTF file and select Save As from the File menu. Save the file using the file-type Text Only (*.txt).
3. From within Final Draft ^TM select Open from the File menu and change the File-type to Text Documents (*.txt). When prompted to do so, open the file as a script.
4. Now it's just a question of tidying up. There will be a spurious character at the bottom of the script which you need to delete. Also at the top of the script the title-page info should be deleted. You should use the Title-page option from the Document menu to re-do it. Note that Final Draft occasionally gets things wrong when importing plain-text script-files. In particular, characters with more than one word in their name sometimes get interpreted erroneously as Action, as does the dialog text that follows it. It is important, therefore, to go through the whole script manually to weed out any errors.

Converting ScriptMaker XML files

Inexpensive shareware programs are available which can convert ScriptMaker XML files into other formats including various word-processor formats for PCs and MacIntosh.

One such tool is ABC Amber XML Converter which can take an XML file and an accompanying XSL stylesheet and convert it into a variety of formats including PDF, RTF, TXT, HTML, a variety of Word and WordPerfect formats for both PC and MacIntosh, a variety of Microsoft Works formats, RFT-DCA, WordStar and Windows Write formats.

I have experimented with this software and it seems to work well, given an XML file and XSL stylesheet. The example XSL stylesheet file supplied with ScriptMaker might need tweaking but that's a fairly simple task. As regards PDF export, perhaps the CutePDF route, as described above, to still preferable, but Amber Converter is still a very powerful tool by the looks of things.

Perhaps now you understand why I wrote the XML stuff into ScriptMaker?

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