![]() There are hundreds of characters to choose from obscure iconography to foreign currency symbols. What you see above is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Selecting the character viewer will bring up this window, showing you every character/symbol might ever need to use while writing: That will create this icon (and dropdown menu) on your desktop. Then click where it says “Show Keyboard & Character Viewer in menu bar.” Or you can use the Mac’s built-in “character viewer.” To do that, open the System Preferences and select the Keyboard pane. Just press “ OPTION-semicolon” and it’ll create one. But that doesn’t mean you can’t add one yourself: Adding an ellipsis symbol instead can help eliminate orphan words.Īdding an “ellipses symbol” is easy on a Mac. Microsoft Word automatically addresses this issue by turning three consecutive periods into an “ellipsis symbol” that only counts as a single character. The problem is that a single ellipsis adds three characters to the last word in your sentence, and three characters is sometimes one or two too many, creating “orphan words” that push into the next line.Īdding ellipses the old fashioned way, by hitting the period button three times.Įxtra lines can be very annoying, pushing things off the page you might want there, or even adding to the overall page count. OK, now you know another method of how to let Final Draft help you speed up your writing with predefined and custom defined Macros for recurring script elements.Okay, it’s a less a “trick” than a standard feature of Mac computers (and I’m assuming PCs as well), but it’s something most people don’t know about.įirst off, you shouldn’t rely too heavily on ellipses in general, but they have their purpose. You have to make best use of the ones that are predefined here. Just select one of them and change the parameters to your liking. You can change any of those you see in the list here. If they haven’t corrected that already, the User’s manual says you can only change two of the Macros in the list, that is the “Option-0” and “Shift-Option-0” Macro.īut that is not true. So if you want to enter another script element you don’t even have to place the cursor correctly, it’s sufficient to place it somewhere in the element before and then just hit the shortcut keys that trigger said Macro.Īnd depending on the “Transition to” setting of that Macro, Final Draft will stay on that script element and wait for further text entry or will jump to the element that is specified in the “Transition to” menu.ĭon’t let yourself be confused by the Final Draft User’s Manual. If you use a macro in the middle of a text block the macro will not trigger where your cursor is right now but rather insert the macro at the end of the text block. This can be “none” if you want to continue typing in the current element after having used that Macros, or you can define another script element that Final Draft will jump to after having inserted the Macro text. “Transition to” defines what element is being created after having activated this macro. ![]() For example, if you use a Macro that fills in “INT.” For you, you will want that to be a scene heading element. The Macro Element dropdown menu defines which element a certain Macro belongs to. The Macro Text defines the text that is inserted when this Macro is triggered. ![]() The name of the Macro is shown in the list below with the corresponding shortcut. The name of the Macro is defined in the bar up top. What you find is a list of pre-defined macros with the related keyboard shortcut. To open the macro window go to “Document – Macros”. Macros are essentially shortcuts that create commonly used text elements for you. This is another method to speed up your writing process because Macros can create script elements more quickly than having to type them every time you need them. In this lesson we’re going to have a look at Macros.
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