We are going to open and edit a script. You will learn advanced editing in this tutorial. This will take about 30 minutes. Do not save the script as you practice this tutorial.
Once again open the file Till Death Do Us Part.sws.
We want to edit the Rugby scene. So, to get there we do a search on the word Rugby. Select Edit, Find… and the find dialog box will come up. Then type in “Rugby” and press Enter. Watch the status bar at the screen bottom. As it searches the script for “rugby” the status bar will show how far the search has gone through the script.
The dialog box will appear as follows:
While the find dialog is up, you can switch over to the main window and edit the script. Then switch back to the find dialog. Click on the main window and move the cursor around. Then click back on the find box.
Now click Cancel to close the find dialog box.
We decide to replace “ball” with “pigskin”. First press PageUp if you are in the rugby scene (from when you clicked over to the scene while the find dialog box was up). Now select Edit, Replace… You will be prompted for the replace to do. Enter “ball” in the Find what prompt and “pigskin” in the Replace with prompt. Then press Enter. You will get the following dialog box:
What has happened is that Screen Writer Studio has found the first occurrence of ball and has selected the word ball in the script. But nothing has been replaced yet. You now have four options.
First, if you do not want to replace this occurrence of ball, press Find Next. Ball will not be replaced at this location and it will go find the next location of ball. Press Find Next to not change it here and go to the next location of ball.
Second, if you want to replace this occurrence of ball and check the next occurrence, press Replace. This will replace ball with pigskin at this one location. Press Replace to change it at this one location and go check the next location.
Third, if you want to replace all further occurrences of ball, with no more prompts, press Replace All. This will replace ball with pigskin through the rest of the script. Press Replace All to replace the rest of the occurrences of ball.
Fourth, you can press Cancel to stop. This will close the Replace dialog box and replace nothing.
When you pressed Enter, that was the same as pressing Find Next. You can enter the replacement and press Replace All instead and it will immediately go and replace throughout the script.
Undo is implemented in Screen Writer Studio in a manner that is very simple and intuitive. However, since most other word processors implement undo as a limited sub-set of the Screen Writer Studio approach, it may be more difficult to understand. (The Screen Writer Studio approach is generally considered the best approach for undo. It’s just a lot more difficult to implement.)
When you interact with Screen Writer Studio, you do so by giving Screen Writer Studio commands. These commands come from keys you type and mouse commands. Some of these commands change the script, such as inserting a letter. Others come from bringing up dialog boxes, entering settings in the dialog box, and then pressing OK or another button in the dialog box.
Undo undoes your last command. It does not undo just some commands, it undoes all commands (except global spell checking which is covered below). If you press undo 3 times, it undoes your last 3 commands.
When you bring up a dialog box, it does not undo the actions you took within the dialog box. It undoes the changes in the script that occurred when you applied the dialog box to the script.
To demonstrate this, we will dive in to a complex example. In the sub-section above our replace commands were composed of 4 actions; 1) The initial Find Next (pressing Enter) which moved the caret to the first occurrence of ball and selected the word, 2) The Find Next which skipped the first occurrence of ball and moved the caret to the second occurrence and selected it, 3) The Replace which replaced that one occurrence of ball with pigskin and moved the caret to the next occurrence of ball, 4) The Replace All which replaced the rest of the occurrences of ball with pigskin.
The caret is presently sitting on the paragraph:
Vivian's head darts back and forth watching the person with the pigskin and then Howard.
To undo a command you can select Edit, Undo or press CTRL-Z (hold down the CTRL key and press the Z key). Press CTRL-Z. The paragraph now appears as:
Vivian's head darts back and forth watching the person with the ball and then Howard.
This is because, just before you pressed Replace All above, the caret was sitting at that occurrence of ball and the word was selected. You were clicking buttons in the dialog box but that was how the script appeared.
Four lines above the line just undone is the following paragraph. (You can use the scroll bar to view this if you cannot see it. Movements of the scroll bar are not tracked by undo.)
Howard throws the pigskin back right by Vivian's head.
Press CTRL-Z again and it will change to:
Howard throws the ball back right by Vivian's head.
This just undid the Replace command where you replaced this occurrence of ball with pigskin.
Five lines above this line is the line with the word ball that you did not replace. Press CTRL-Z again and it will move back up to this line and select the word ball here.
A ball is thrown from behind Vivian so it barely misses Vivian's head and Howard catches it. Vivian flinches as she sees it go by.
This time no text in the script was changed. But where the caret was and what was selected changed. Because when you pressed Find Next previously you did not change any text.
Press CTRL-Z one more time and the caret will be moved back to where it was when you first brought up the replace dialog box.
The replace dialog box is not involved in the undo. The words you typed in the replace dialog are not undone a character at a time. This is because undo undoes changes to the script, not changes to a dialog box. And typing the words to find and replace in the dialog made no changes to the script. But pressing the buttons in the replace dialog did change the script.
With that said, undo does track the text entered into the replace dialog as a whole. Once you undo past when you entered the text in the replace dialog, the text will be back to the text that was in there before (in our case - blank).
Also note that just moving the caret in the script is a change. The words in the script are the same but the position of the caret, or what is selected, has changed.
Now go back up to the replace exercise, and replace ball with pigskin again. Watch what happens to the script on each command in replace. Then undo it all again.
Now we will do an easier example. Press the ® 3 times followed by typing “abc”. Now press CTRL-Z 6 times. It will undo the letters typed in one at a time and then the caret movement.
When you spell check the script, not just 1 word but the entire script, your previous undo history is lost. You cannot undo back past a spell check. This was done because you generally will not want to undo a script spell check. And if the spell check cannot be undone, then commands before the spell check cannot be undone.
Aside from that, any command can be undone. If you cheat the document or change the formatting of a paragraph style (shown in later tutorials), a single CTRL-Z will undo that command, reformatting the entire script. Undo also undoes what is in the clipboard.
Redo will undo an undo. Because it undoes an undo, you can only select redo right after an undo. To redo a command press CTRL-Y. Press it now 6 times and the 3 caret right movements will be redone followed by it reinserting “abc”.
You can undo up to the last 30 commands. If this isn’t enough, you can increase this in options. You can also speed Screen Writer Studio up a little if you set this to 0. So if you never use undo, set it to 0. But try using it before you decide you will never need it.
Cut, (Copy, ) & Paste are the terms for copying text from one part of your script to another. The way this works is you select a section of text. You then select Edit, Cut or Edit, Copy to cut or copy the text to a hidden clipboard. Copy makes a copy while cut copies it over and then deletes it from the script.
You then place the caret where you want to insert the text you copied to the clipboard and select Edit, Paste. The text will then be copied into the new location. And the text is also still in the clipboard so you can paste multiple times.
The clipboard is provided by Windows. All programs see the same clipboard. This allows programs to copy text to each other. One program can cut or copy the text in and the other then uses that text to paste.
The clipboard can only hold one block of data (text) at a time so what ever was cut or copied into the clipboard last from any program is what will be pasted in Screen Writer Studio.
The clipboard lets program place data in it in various formats. Each program also only understands certain formats when pasting from the clipboard. For example, if a picture is copied into the clipboard, Screen Writer Studio has no way of understanding a picture and therefore cannot paste it.
Every time you cut or copy text, Screen Writer Studio places the selected text into the clipboard in 3 formats. The first is text format. This is just the text with a <CR> (Carriage Return, the thing that moves the text down to the next line) at the end of each paragraph. There are no margins, line spacing, or other formatting information. For any data that is text, every Windows program can both read and write this format to/from the clipboard.
The second is RTF format. This is similar to the Rich Text File format. This includes full formatting information for each paragraph. However, while a paragraph’s margins are known, it may not include information about what paragraph style the reading program should put it in. For example, both the Scene and Action paragraphs have identical paragraph formatting settings.
Every Windows word processor, including the screen-writing programs, support this format. (Note: if you need to read in a RTF file, you can open it in a word processor, copy it all in the word processor, and paste it in Screen Writer Studio. However, you will get better results if you open the file directly as you will be able to map paragraph formats to paragraph styles.)
The third is Screen Writer Studio format. This format is understood by Screen Writer Studio only. It has all information Screen Writer Studio needs to copy the information exactly. However, no other program can place information in the clipboard in this format and no other program can read it.
When Screen Writer Studio pastes from the clipboard, it will use Screen Writer Studio format if it’s available. If not, it will use the RTF format. If that is not available, it will use the text format. You can also use the Edit, Paste Special to force which format is used.
Move to the top of page 2. First we are going to copy a sentence from one set of dialogue to another. Select the sentence starting on line 6. Then select Edit, Copy to copy it to the clipboard.
I don't know what happened. She slipped or something. She just suddenly wasn't there.
Now move the caret to line 18 at the beginning of the second sentence in that paragraph - “There were…”
I started climbing down to grab her. There were some other branches so I was able to move on down toward her.
Now select Edit, Paste and you get:
I started climbing down to grab her. I don't know what happened. She slipped or something. There were some other branches so I was able to move on down toward her.
Now we are going to paste this in the middle of the action on line 12 - 15, at the start of the second sentence:
Howard runs up to where Susan fell and leans over. About 10' down the cliff Susan hangs on to a branch with her hands. The rest of her dangles over a 100' drop. She looks absolutely panicked and cries with fear.
Now select Edit, Paste and you get:
Howard runs up to where Susan fell and leans over.
I don't know what happened. She slipped or something.
About 10' down the cliff Susan hangs on to a branch with her hands. The rest of her dangles over a 100' drop. She looks absolutely panicked and cries with fear.
What happened here is that you pasted text of type Dialogue into a paragraph of type Action. Because the Dialogue you pasted is probably going to still be Dialogue, just at a new location, it is kept as type Dialogue. And therefore, it creates a paragraph for it.
Now select the lines and select Edit, Copy.
HOWARD (V.O.)
I don't know what happened. She slipped or something. She just suddenly wasn't there.
Susan slips and then slides over the edge of the trail.
Now start up a word processor. If you do not have one, go to Windows Start, Programs, Accessories, Word Pad. In that program select Edit, Paste. You will see the text copied across with the correct formatting.
Now copy the text in your word processor by selecting it and then go to Screen Writer Studio and paste. Screen Writer Studio will attempt to guess which paragraph formatting to apply to each paragraph inserted. But it may not get everything right.
If you want to try copying in the text format between programs, go to Windows Start, Programs, Accessories, NotePad. Notepad only handle the text format. So you can paste to it. Your text will look like this:
HOWARD (V.O.)
I don't know what happened. She slipped or something. She just suddenly wasn't there.
Susan slips and then slides over the edge of the trail.
You can then copy from Notepad and paste into Screen Writer Studio. The formatting will probably be off (it has to guess with no real information). But the text will all be there, the paragraph breaks will be correct, and all you have to do is select the paragraph style for each inserted paragraph.
If you are ever curious about what clipboard formats are present, select Edit, Paste Special and the formats presently in the clipboard are the formats not grayed out.
Close (without saving) and re-open Till Death Do Us Part.sws.
Go to page 2, line 3 and select the word “pretty”. Now select Tools, Spell Check. You will see the following dialog box.
This tells you the selected word is spelled correctly. Press No. Now delete one of the t’s from pretty making it prety. Place the caret before the word selecting nothing. Now select Tools, Spell Check. This tells Screen Writer Studio to spell check the entire script.
Select the suggestion pretty and press Change. You could also have pressed Change All to change all occurrences of prety to pretty.
It will now go to the next misspelled word which is Viv (short for Vivian). We want to allow this anywhere in this script, but not other scripts. So press Ignore All. If Viv was ok here but not elsewhere, you would have pressed Ignore.
It will now find Congrats. This is a word we want to accept in any script. So press Add. This will add the word Congrats to your dictionary and it will now be accepted in all scripts.
And you have now fixed all spelling errors in your script.
Move the caret to any paragraph, Type in “ theyll “. Note the spaces at both ends, it needs to be a word by itself. And note that it is missing the ‘. Once you type the trailing space, letting Screen Writer Studio know the word is done, it will automatically correct it to “they’ll”.
Now type “WHo ”. After you type the trailing space, it will change to “Who”. This is caused by your finger not getting off the shift key quickly enough. It only corrects words of 3 or more letters where exactly the first two are capitalized.
This is done for numerous misspellings. You can pretty much ignore this feature as it will just quietly do its work for you.
Place the caret anywhere on the word pretty and select Tools, Thesaurus… You will see the following screen.
Press Look Up and it will then list synonyms of beautiful. Now select beautiful in the left-most list box and press Antonyms. You now have Antonyms of beautiful. In Replace with it lists abhorrent. Press Replace to replace pretty with abhorrent.
There’s not much to say here. Select some text. Then select Format, Font, Bold. The selected text is now bold. Select three more parts and try Italic, Strikethrough, and Underline. These can overlap.
But keep in mind that many people in the industry say you should never use any of these except for underline where required.
You should rarely need this but it’s there if you do. Select all of the paragraph starting on page 2, line 13:
Howard runs up to where Susan fell and leans over...
Now select Format, Capitals, ALL UPPERCASE. It will look like:
HOWARD RUNS UP TO WHERE SUSAN FELL AND LEANS OVER...
Now select Format, Capitals, ALL lowercase. It will look like:
howard runs up to where susan fell and leans over...
Now select Format, Capitals, ALL Mixed Case. It will look like:
Howard Runs Up To Where Susan Fell And Leans Over...
Now select Format, Capitals, ALL Smart case. It will look like:
Howard runs up to where susan fell and leans over...