Cleaning up an Imported Script SCRIPTIGO PRO

The Fountain script format follows industry standards for formatting and sometimes imported scripts don't adhere to it. Scripts imported from poor quality PDF files can also produce unexpected results. Scriptigo does its best to fix these inconsistencies and errors, but you may have to correct line breaks or text formatting yourself if it wasn't correctly set up in the original file. Open the script in editing mode to correct these issues.

Importing PDFs
PDFs looks nice, but they are a terrible mess inside the file. Scriptigo will attempt to extract any text it finds and reformat it correctly. Some PDFs are just a series of scanned images with no actual text to import. In these cases we recommend using the OCR feature in Adobe Acrobat to recognize the text and export a Word file from Acrobat, which will produce better results. Keep in mind the quality of OCR can depend on factors such as the quality/resolution of the original (and it helps to separate each page instead of trying to use OCR on spreads) so the results will likely need to be proofed for accuracy. If you need to do a lot of OCR work, you might consider a better and more accurate option, ABBYY FineReader. If you have a choice of formats to import, PDF should be your last choice.

Importing Word documents
Importing Word documents respects the formatting and line breaks from the original. Word keeps the order of your text pretty tidy (PDFs have little sense of the order of lines inside the files). If you have a choice of formats to import, choose Word, Final Draft, or plain text over PDF.

Using Script Doctor
To help with common file issues, we created Script Doctor. You can find this tool in the app settings. It will located the issues and compile a list for you to tap through and quickly resolve.

NOTE: You can also use the Find and Replace feature to clean up PDFs that won't process cleanly. Searching for "\n" (without the quotes) will find all returns and searching for "\t" (without the quotes) will find all tabs. With a few carefully crafted search and replaces, you can quickly clean up your script formatting.