We are pleased to announce that we have completely rewritten the screenplay module for NovaMind Platinum for Mac, based on the feedback from our screenwriter users.

Full Screenplay Editing

The new screenwriter has the entire screenplay shown all the time, with the text for the selected branch highlighted. This makes it much easier to create and work with your screenplay, and see how it is attached to the branches. When you move the cursor in your screenplay, the branch for that part of the screenplay is automatically selected. When you select a branch that has no screenwriting attached to it, a line is opened up in the screenplay so you can attach a portion of your screenplay to that branch.

All this makes it a breeze to create your screenplays.

New Control Bar

At the bottom of the window is a control bar which allows you to jump through all the branches with screenwriting text attached to them, see the page and scene numbers, change the element types, change the capitalization of the selected text, see what the next element types are when pressing Tab or Return, and zoom the screenplay for easier reading.

This gives you all the tools you need to work with your screenplay at your fingertips.

Improvements in Basic ScreenPlay Editing

We have made many improvements over the previous screenwriter in the handling of element type selection, completions, mores and continueds, copying and pasting, character and scene completions etc.

In short, the whole screenwriting functionality of NovaMind for Mac has been rewritten to match the needs of screenwriters. It is now in beta testing and will be released shortly. This is a free update for existing NovaMind 4 Platinum users.

Other New Screenwriting Features

In addition, we have many new features which make the screenwriter much more powerful and flexible. These include:

• Scene numbering in the margins
• Ability to configure how the next states on Tab and Return work
• Ability to set the line spacing, capitalization and character positioning of the different element types
• Smart widow/orphan protection of dialogue, keeping it with its scene and character information where required

The new screenwriter requires that you use MacOSX 10.5 Leopard.

This decision was first announced over a year ago, and we now have implemented based on this decision. The reason is because we use a number of new features that were only introduced in version 10.5. It will not run at all in earlier versions of Mac OS X.

Windows version coming soon

We will be introducing a Windows version of the new screenwriter in a few months, and in the meantime any screenplays you write in either the Windows or Mac version of NovaMind will be able to be read and used on the other platform.

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Tags: NovaMind, screenplay, screenwriters, Screenwriting

This entry was posted on Friday, May 16th, 2008 at 7:35 am and is filed under Announcements, Screenwriting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.