I love the concept of Causality it is exactly what I have been looking for to handle complex plotting and multi threaded stories. However can you advise when the importing from and exporting to Word DOCX will be available?
Hey there, Cathy! Apologies for the late response. As for importing from and exporting to Word DOCX, I'm not sure when that feature will be available. However, one option could be to use a third-party tool to convert your Word documents to a compatible format, such as PDF or RTF, before importing them into Causality.
Also, if you're dealing with text in your Word documents, Smart Engines OCR could be a helpful tool to recognize and extract text from images. It might be worth checking out if you need to work with OCR content in your documents.
Apologies for the late response. As for importing from and exporting to Word DOCX, I'm not sure when that feature will be available. However, one option could be to use a third-party tool to convert your Word documents to a compatible format, such as PDF or RTF, before importing them into Causality.
That has been out for some time. Behind the scenes, we use the www.cloudconvert.com API for direct DOCX import/export. If you don't want your text to go through a cloud service, you can import/export specially rigged Word HTML files, which work offline and produce identical results.
I have been a registered user for some time now and use Causality for plotting novels which I would like to finish using the authoring software Papyrusautor once the draft is complete. I just received and installed version 3.1.1 of Causality and would like to provide the following feedback:
The Export to Word (HTML) function does not work and the result is unreadable.
Export to Word (docx - file) works conditionally, only pure text.
The same applies to export/only text.
Import/Word, /Word HTML does not work.
What works as I imagine is Print to PDF, which I can also read into Word.
Location and beat text is the only "real" part of the document, which is what is exported. Everything else is meta-data, characters, lanes, tags, synopsis, that's all stuff "around" the script.
It's true that PDF has options to print some of this for review during development, but it's not expected that any of this is present in a final result for someone to read. Only the beat text, and locations, title pages and episode/act breaks are expect to be present in a screenplay. The rest is stuff inside Causality that helps you write.
It's possible that the Docx export can grow to have similar options has the PDF exporter. But this isn't quite a bug.
I am now facing the issue of having to transport my data between Causality and Papyrus Autor and back, as I do not want to give up either of these software solutions. I had hoped to use the export/import functionality for this purpose, as both programs can handle PDF, and neither seem suitable for automation processes. We'll see what can be done.
To be fully honest, this is mostly a hopeless workflow, and it's not even about Causality and Papyrus. Unless programs think exactly the same about the data they're handling, same model, same everything, it's going to be super lossy to go between programs.
Screenwriting programs for example are all almost the exact same program, and you wonder why so many even exist. They think so identically about what a screenplay is that it's actually possible to go from one app to another. But vast amounts of what is in Causality has no representation in any other app. No one thinks in Beats, except possibly Scrivener. What's a Lane or a Research folder in Final Draft? Stuff like that.
Papyrus also thinks smaller more typically about the model of a story than Causality does, and that's even going to get worse as we add Emotion Tracking, Parallel Scripts, Dependency Graph, and much more. Every single time you try to round-trip, you're going to lose everything you've done in Causality except the text, like going from Photoshop to MS Paint and back to Photoshop.
You're going to have to choose, or keep the apps separate.
We think we're becoming ready for the alpha this week. But a little kink has arisen of something we have to refactor now. Besides that, we only have to do the document upgrader and some of the videos, which indicates that we're close to the end.
While I can't wait for the Word export function too, I've found it works ok to export as HTML and then open with Word. It seems to carry across all the formatting, indents, chapter headings etc. The only thing I need to change are the margins, which is a two second job. Totally awesome program!
there is a way which is the scene delimiter generally three *** which novelists use between scenes. This is pretty much standard practice. Novelists insert these between scenes within a chapter. Chapters are recognised by headings formatting. That is how it is done in other writing programs importing from word.
I think this will be the first version of Word import/export, which only specifically includes the things that we handle. After all, a novel to be submitted to a publisher doesn't include a lot of fonts and emojis and pictures. It stops at bold/italic/underline, and maybe a font for chapter and section headings.
There is a great problem with Word importing which is as of yet unresolved, which is how to break it into beats. With screenplays it's easy, because a scene is a natural delimiter that's guaranteed to be present every few pages max. Since the script is broken into a bunch of mini-text-editors, we'd like to not import a Word document into one 300-page beat and then ask you to break it up.
But it's difficult to come up with some logic for how to break it up. For sure we can break at chapter marks. Besides that, are there any cues in a typically formatted novel we could use? Or would it work to simply break every e.g. 10 paragraphs? The problem with arbitrary breaking is that it forces you to merge all those beats and then break them again in a better place.
So one idea that has been floated is that you ask people to pre-break the document by inserting some text every time there's a beat, e.g. "=====". The problem I foresee with that is that nobody is going to do it. And by the time they realize that they should have done it, they'll have done too much work in Causality and can't just re-import. So this idea seems a bit dead to me.
We need to come up with a way to data-mine the text to break it into beats. Please post if you notice any cues that could be used.
I agree that doc export would be useful (for me, moreso than input - and I imagine export is simpler to code), but I do think it could be pretty rudimentary. While all the header/footer details listed by Cathy would be great, even a basic export function would be great - just text, broken sensibly, with bold/italics etc carried across. When I've used Causality for book writing, I've used beats as story moments, and blocks as scene markers, with chapter and act breaks as (unsurprisingly) chapter and act breaks. I think an export which ignored everything below Chapter level could still be useful - or a function could be added for inserting a 'dinkus' break (what I believe that row of asterisks is called), and that could be the sub-chapter level break.
Yes, exporting your script to DOCX is very important.
Of all the scripting software I know, Causality is the only one that doesn't know how to export a script to DOCX.
Adding and formatting a title page, re-numbering pages or scenes, adding a character bible, removing some special characters, such as (CONT'D) - these tasks become extremely difficult and time-consuming.
The PDF script cannot be edited properly.
Conversion of a script from a PDF file to the DOCX format does not work completely correctly. Spaces between words may disappear and other problems may arise.
As a result, in order to make minor changes to the script formatting at the request of the studio, I have to first check the entire text for errors after converting from PDF to DOCX. It is very uncomfortable.
As of today, you do not have the ability to format the script within the program.
You won't be able to meet the requirements of all studios and all script editors around the world. In many cases, the final document will still require revision.
It seems to me that to solve this problem, it is easier to export the script to DOCX.
I believe so. I want to try to keep this task at the top of the list, alongside collaboration.
But quick focus group: How many features are we really talking about getting in and out of a word document? A novel is typically just Times New Roman with 1" margins and not a lot of fluff. It's not rocket science to support importing the basic text plus a couple of headings to map to chapters and acts. Am I right in assuming that the formatting we need to support is pretty basic?
And secondly, there's a fundamental problem in where to break text into snippets. In screenwriting, you have natural boundaries at scenes, so it's easy to decide where to create the initial beats. In a novel, it's very difficult to choose where to break into beats, and we do have to break into beats, or you'd have 200-page beats.
Is there any kind of natural pattern you notice in where you break long text into beats? Something a computer could recognize?
I'll add a little more to the discussion. Unfortunately, your assertion that Final Draft is the screenwriting standard worldwide is not entirely correct. This is not the case in the countries of the former USSR. In the early 2000s, the demand for television series increased sharply in our countries and there was a sharp surge in the production of television series. But at that moment, the Final Draft program did not yet have localization in the languages of these countries. For this reason, production companies were forced to work with scripts in DOC or DOCX format, as well as develop their software products to work with scripts. Since then, it so happened that in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia and other countries, the most common standard for providing a script is DOCX. Regardless of which program the screenwriter writes the script in, he just needs to be able to export the script to DOCX, because the editor of the production company may ask him to provide the script in this format.
I don't know if that screenwriting/Docx workflow has stuck around, because any users I talk to in those regions seem to only think in terms of FDX file formats.
To be clear, when I mention standards, I'm talking about the FDX file format, which is the input/output format of choice for countless production systems.
There is also a certain gravity also towards the Final Draft app, which is in my opinion somewhat undeserved, since if you want this screenwriting workflow, apps like Writer Duet are far superior. But regardless of apps, the FDX file is kind of the name of the game for interchange, and I suspect a lot of previous Docx users will have migrated back.
But either way, Causality now imports and exports Docx, although the assumption is that it's a novel, so we don't do any screenplay formatting detection.
But that will change. We have some old code that makes screenwriting format from plain text, and we want to apply this both to copy/paste and Word import. So we'll also be able to import a screenplay in Word format, although a few bad guesses about formatting are inevitable.
Well, if it's not about the production process, but about the initial contact of an independent screenwriter and a studio editor or an editor of a production company, then the editor may ask for the script in both FDX and DOCX format. And in my humble experience, editors are still more likely to ask for a script in DOCX.
But all these details no longer make sense if you have already done a DOCX import-export... Thank you very much.
Thanks for the reply. Let's hope you can get to it soon. Do you think it will be delivered within the next 3-6 months or longer? It's a showstopper for novelists without it. But Causality is such a wonderful tool for plotting I'd love to promote it to novel writers, however without a way to get the book out of the platform it lacks cred as a tool for novels.
I agree this is something that's important. We've neglected it in the interest of doing one thing well (screenwriting) rather than two things half-assed. But I understand the problem.
I'm also a big fan of Causality, and I'm glad to see someone else who appreciates its capabilities.
Hey there, Cathy! Apologies for the late response. As for importing from and exporting to Word DOCX, I'm not sure when that feature will be available. However, one option could be to use a third-party tool to convert your Word documents to a compatible format, such as PDF or RTF, before importing them into Causality.
Also, if you're dealing with text in your Word documents, Smart Engines OCR could be a helpful tool to recognize and extract text from images. It might be worth checking out if you need to work with OCR content in your documents.
Apologies for the late response. As for importing from and exporting to Word DOCX, I'm not sure when that feature will be available. However, one option could be to use a third-party tool to convert your Word documents to a compatible format, such as PDF or RTF, before importing them into Causality.
Hi all,
I have been a registered user for some time now and use Causality for plotting novels which I would like to finish using the authoring software Papyrusautor once the draft is complete. I just received and installed version 3.1.1 of Causality and would like to provide the following feedback:
The Export to Word (HTML) function does not work and the result is unreadable.
Export to Word (docx - file) works conditionally, only pure text.
The same applies to export/only text.
Import/Word, /Word HTML does not work.
What works as I imagine is Print to PDF, which I can also read into Word.
Thanks
os|<ar
Great news! Thanks Per :)
Hi, Word Import/Export is on the beta channel, and will roll out wide during the coming week.
Awesome! Very excited about this 😄
We think we're becoming ready for the alpha this week. But a little kink has arisen of something we have to refactor now. Besides that, we only have to do the document upgrader and some of the videos, which indicates that we're close to the end.
Good news Per, can’t wait to see v3.0. Any ETA on when we will see it?
cheers
cathy
Ah thanks Jeff, good to know!
cathy
We just need to get 3.0 out and stable, and this is one of the only things that will be allowed to get in front of collaboration.
While I can't wait for the Word export function too, I've found it works ok to export as HTML and then open with Word. It seems to carry across all the formatting, indents, chapter headings etc. The only thing I need to change are the margins, which is a two second job. Totally awesome program!
That's great, so that could be an option in the import dialog. Super tip!
Hi Per,
there is a way which is the scene delimiter generally three *** which novelists use between scenes. This is pretty much standard practice. Novelists insert these between scenes within a chapter. Chapters are recognised by headings formatting. That is how it is done in other writing programs importing from word.
cheers
cathy
I think this will be the first version of Word import/export, which only specifically includes the things that we handle. After all, a novel to be submitted to a publisher doesn't include a lot of fonts and emojis and pictures. It stops at bold/italic/underline, and maybe a font for chapter and section headings.
There is a great problem with Word importing which is as of yet unresolved, which is how to break it into beats. With screenplays it's easy, because a scene is a natural delimiter that's guaranteed to be present every few pages max. Since the script is broken into a bunch of mini-text-editors, we'd like to not import a Word document into one 300-page beat and then ask you to break it up.
But it's difficult to come up with some logic for how to break it up. For sure we can break at chapter marks. Besides that, are there any cues in a typically formatted novel we could use? Or would it work to simply break every e.g. 10 paragraphs? The problem with arbitrary breaking is that it forces you to merge all those beats and then break them again in a better place.
So one idea that has been floated is that you ask people to pre-break the document by inserting some text every time there's a beat, e.g. "=====". The problem I foresee with that is that nobody is going to do it. And by the time they realize that they should have done it, they'll have done too much work in Causality and can't just re-import. So this idea seems a bit dead to me.
We need to come up with a way to data-mine the text to break it into beats. Please post if you notice any cues that could be used.
I agree that doc export would be useful (for me, moreso than input - and I imagine export is simpler to code), but I do think it could be pretty rudimentary. While all the header/footer details listed by Cathy would be great, even a basic export function would be great - just text, broken sensibly, with bold/italics etc carried across. When I've used Causality for book writing, I've used beats as story moments, and blocks as scene markers, with chapter and act breaks as (unsurprisingly) chapter and act breaks. I think an export which ignored everything below Chapter level could still be useful - or a function could be added for inserting a 'dinkus' break (what I believe that row of asterisks is called), and that could be the sub-chapter level break.
Excited to see the 3.0 developments!
Yes, exporting your script to DOCX is very important.
Of all the scripting software I know, Causality is the only one that doesn't know how to export a script to DOCX.
Adding and formatting a title page, re-numbering pages or scenes, adding a character bible, removing some special characters, such as (CONT'D) - these tasks become extremely difficult and time-consuming.
The PDF script cannot be edited properly.
Conversion of a script from a PDF file to the DOCX format does not work completely correctly. Spaces between words may disappear and other problems may arise.
As a result, in order to make minor changes to the script formatting at the request of the studio, I have to first check the entire text for errors after converting from PDF to DOCX. It is very uncomfortable.
As of today, you do not have the ability to format the script within the program.
You won't be able to meet the requirements of all studios and all script editors around the world. In many cases, the final document will still require revision.
It seems to me that to solve this problem, it is easier to export the script to DOCX.
Sorry for my english
I believe so. I want to try to keep this task at the top of the list, alongside collaboration.
But quick focus group: How many features are we really talking about getting in and out of a word document? A novel is typically just Times New Roman with 1" margins and not a lot of fluff. It's not rocket science to support importing the basic text plus a couple of headings to map to chapters and acts. Am I right in assuming that the formatting we need to support is pretty basic?
And secondly, there's a fundamental problem in where to break text into snippets. In screenwriting, you have natural boundaries at scenes, so it's easy to decide where to create the initial beats. In a novel, it's very difficult to choose where to break into beats, and we do have to break into beats, or you'd have 200-page beats.
Is there any kind of natural pattern you notice in where you break long text into beats? Something a computer could recognize?
Thanks for the reply. Let's hope you can get to it soon. Do you think it will be delivered within the next 3-6 months or longer? It's a showstopper for novelists without it. But Causality is such a wonderful tool for plotting I'd love to promote it to novel writers, however without a way to get the book out of the platform it lacks cred as a tool for novels.
cheers
Cathy
I agree this is something that's important. We've neglected it in the interest of doing one thing well (screenwriting) rather than two things half-assed. But I understand the problem.