We will read in a RTF file from another word processor or screen writing program. You only need to follow this tutorial if you are going to be reading in RTF files. This tutorial will take about 5 minutes and requires that you have a RTF file you want to read in.
This example uses Till Death Do Us Part as exported by another screenwriting editor. This file is not included with Screen Writer Studio so you have to get your own file to do this.
Select File, Open… Then in the dialogue at the bottom in Files of type select Rich Text Files.
We will select tddup.rtf and click Open. You will then get this dialog box:
We select Screenplay. This tells Screen Writer Studio which formatting settings to use on the file being read in. This is very important because the RTF file does not say what type each paragraph is, just what its margins are. So Screen Writer Studio will try to match up the margins in the screenplay style with the margins in the RTF file.
Click on Next and you get:
Generally these settings will be correct (coming from the style for this type of script). However, the RTF file may be formatted differently. The critical fields are setting if Character Direction and/or Action have parenthesis and what the separators are in the scene headings. The scene separators need to include the correct number of spaces.
Because tddup.rtf has a title page, we click on that check box. This tells Screen Writer Studio to skip the first page when looking for paragraph types as the first page will have a number of title page only settings.
Set these settings correctly and then click Next.
You next will optionally get a dialog box asking you to say what paragraph styles in the RTF file are what styles in the script. You will not get this dialog box if the only paragraph settings are normal, header, and footer (as is the case here).
If you assign a RTF paragraph style to a script style, all paragraphs of that style will be assigned, regardless of your settings in the next dialog box. Only RTF paragraph styles set to unassigned and RTF paragraphs set to the normal style will be set based on the settings in this next dialog box.
You then get a status bar as the file is read. Wait for it to complete and then press Next again. You will then get:
As you can see, it has the first paragraph of each type. Click on each paragraph in the left column and see what it is mapped to in the right column. If it’s wrong, then click on the right style in the right column. Once they are all mapped correctly, click on the Finish button.
You now have your script in Screen Writer Studio. Make sure you save it as a Screen Writer Studio file, and not as an RTF file.