ever heard of plato, aristotle, ...?

not socrates--sophocles!

(but for some reason i can't get vizzini out of my head this week--thank you, wallace shawn.)

sophocles isn't just the name of the guy who wrote antigone, it's also the name of my favorite screenwriting program.

for ages i stuck with my own word templates (years of tech writing have left me with an absurd comfort level with ms word tweaks), and swore i'd never fork over the money for final draft or its ilk. then i won a copy of gorilla software at an sf cutters meeting last year and started playing with a trial copy of frameforge, and got this crazy idea that i needed final draft because it pipes into software that expects "industry standard" scripts.

for the life of me, i couldn't use final draft. it does this crazy thing where the pagination gets screwy and you can't see the line that's at the bottom of the page (older versions of word used to do this, like word 2.0 or something). and the famed index cards aren't tied to the script in a way that makes sense to me. weird things happened when i saved files. these strange bugs kept coming up--and not just in windows, but on a mac, too. i couldn't believe that this program "everyone" uses was so half-baked. $183.50 down the drain.

but then i found sophocles. it's like this program was designed for me, the screenwriter who knows enough about computers to be driven mad by software that doesn't work.

one of the biggest innovations in sophocles is that the program doesn't force you to look at your script in official script format on the screen. this may seem weird at first, but think about it: you don't need a script to be in a narrow column with courier font until you're printing it out. sophocles lets you look at your script in any font you want, with dialog stretching across the window so you can see more than a couple of lines at a time. the program also estimates running times for scenes and the whole script, so you don't need to keep on top of the one-minute-per-page estimate (unless you want to). when you print, sophocles converts the whole shebang into the right format. excellent.

then there are these great tools for analyzing what you have written. you can see an outline, of course, and notes you've added for each scene--obvious stuff. but sophocles will also tell you who has the most lines in the script, and how much any two characters interact with each other. it will list all of your settings, and how many scenes take place in each. you can find out how long your average scenes are or how much dialog you have compared to stage direction. and that's just the start.

you can print straight from sophocles, export to pdf, or export to rtf, which you can import into final draft if you're set on tagging. i only use final draft as a staging area for getting scripts to other programs or other people who only have final draft--never for actual writing.

and, yes, i boot into windows just to write--sophocles is pc-only. (yay, boot camp!)