I am an amateur scriptwriter.  Amateur in the sense that up to now I have not sold a script. So I am still a charter member of a very large club!

In any case, I would like to tell you about a not-very-happy situation in the hopes that it may be of help to someone.

I've tried a lot of scriptwriting programs (Montage, Celtx, MovieOutline and Final Draft).  I have settled on Final Draft as my program of choice and used FD 7 for a while.  Then out came the new Final Draft 8 which I purchased and have since renamed Final Shaft.  Let me explain.

First off, I use FD 8 on a MacBook running Tiger.  My word processors are NeoOffice (an OpenOffice alternate), Bean and AbiWord.

OK. After installing FD 8, I imported a couple of scripts that I had done on FD 7.  No problem.  I like the new version a lot because of the new features.  However, my problem developed when an agency (believe it or not) asked to see one of my scripts... in .rtf format.  No problem there either.  I open the script and go to save as... and save it as a .rtf.  When I opened the .rtf file, I couldn't believe the mess before my eyes.  The formatting was a total shambles and not presentable in any way.  (The transitions had printed out in vertical!)  Same result saving as a .txt file.  The only thing that worked was to export it as a .pdf. (which the agency said was OK with them)

I then wrote to Final Draft Technical Support and explained to them what happens and ask for some support.

I got a quick reply from Abby of the support staff suggesting that the script file was somehow corrupted and indicating various steps to correct the situation. She also suggested using one of the tutorial scripts that ship with the program which I also did.

I followed all her suggestions with no positive results at all.

In response, I replied that it was still not fixed and I attached partial examples of all the scripts that did not export in proper format.

In response, I received an email with a question mark as the only text!

That has been about two weeks ago and all my subsequent emails inquiring into the situation have gone unanswered.

I still continue to use Final Draft because I truly like it.  And the .pdf work-around let's me ship my scripts to Final Draft non-users. But I feel "shafted" for various reasons:

1. Being sold a product that is obviously deficient.

2. Totally being ignored by the support staff.

So if you stumble across this page in a search and are thinking about Final Draft 8, my advice is to proceed with caution.

18 Sept. 2009

OK. After slamming Final Draft and passing it on, I must now add this to sort-of apologize and clear things up a little.

I did eventually hear from FD (not the staff but one of the owners) and got the thing cleared up.

If you save a script in rtf in FD and then open it anything but Windows you get a garbled version. Being a Mac person, this did not occur to me until the techies explained it all.

So, in the end, the solution for Mac users is to always use pdf and not rtf unless you are sending your script to someone who will open it in Microsoft Word. But then pdf files open in everything, so what's the point?

So thanks to FD for clearing it up in the end.

BUT to add insult to injury, I have moved over to Screenwriter 6 which is not better the FD but for some reason makes me happier.