Hello everyone,
I finally wrote the first version of my script and it's being read by my team right now (yay!). Now I'm sitting on the second draft and I have a little problem....
Before I switched to Causality, I used a different font color for my changes and corrections in the software I was working with before. This way, the reader didn't have to read the whole script from scratch later on and laboriously look for my changes. The colored font allowed him to see immediately where something had been changed. Then whenever I wanted to export the script in black text only again, I pressed CTRL+A, selected everything and chose black for all the text.
That doesn't seem to be possible in Causality anymore, since selecting all the text is only possible within a beat. Changing the color of the text afterwards in each beat individually is way too cumbersome and would take forever. Or have I overlooked a function in the software? Is there perhaps another way to color-code changes to the previous version?
Alternatively, I was looking for a way to compare the two versions of my script as a PDF. I thought perhaps the changes could be shown as comments. This worked with Adobe Acrobat Pro DC, but then I can only save the comparison report with both screenplay versions and not just the new screenplay with the comments individually. I hope that was described understandably...
Actually, I'm just looking for a useful way to visually highlight the changes to the script without having to undo them later in each beat individually.
Does anyone have an idea? 🙂
Thanks for the detailed explanation! The collaboration model is definitely a great thing! In fact, it's also one of the few features I've missed so far. Looking forward to it! For those who are interested: I found an alternative solution yesterday using Adobe Acrobat Pro DC to make the script changes recognizable to others.... 1. export both your old and new script in Causality as PDF. 2. open the full version of Adobe Acrobat and select "Compare Files" in the tools. 3. Open the PDF files of your old and your new version of the script. A comparison report will be created. 4. Delete the first page of the generated document (the report about changes) under "Manage pages". 5. go to the comments section. There you will find all comments with the changes compared to the old version. Go to Options and export the comments as a file. 6. Open the PDF of the new script version in Adobe Acrobat and click on "Import comments" in the options of the comments area. Select the previously exported file with the comments of the comparison report and import it. 7. in your PDF file of the new script version, all the changes compared to the previous version are now in the comments. Happy writing!
Once we get collaboration, we'll also have an infinite history data model where it will easy for the app to highlight the changes between user-defined checkpoints, as well as highlight who did what (called "blame" in software development where you can see who contributed what). Currently there's no history in what's written into the file, so the app only has memory of what was done in the current session.
In terms of selecting all, that's not possible and cannot ever be possible, because the fundamental model of Causality is that beats are the minimum unit, and they're effectively mini-scripts unto themselves glued back to back. While you could imagine a hack way to simulate it, it's a very (very!) big hammer, and it doesn't even satisfyingly solve the problem of tracking changes. What you need is the data-mining we can do once we're switched to the collaborative data model, where you simply output a script with the changes since last output highlighted in a different color.
You could even do this per recipient, so Bob gets highlighted changes since the last script he read, and Jim gets more highlights because his script was longer ago. All such stuff is very easy once we're on the collaborative data model.