Final Draft Review
Professional screenwriters use Final Draft, and you should too, if that's your field. The app has smart auto-suggestions for formatting your work to industry standards. It compiles lists of characters and scene locations automatically. A Beat Board feature replicates the old notecard approach to arranging scenes, and a Story Map helps keep the story on target for pacing and script length. Among writing apps, Final Draft is one of the most expensive products you can buy, but it's worth the price and sells for a one-time fee rather than as a recurring subscription. Final Draft is a PCMag Editors' Choice winner for screenwriting software and one of the best apps for writers in general.
If you're not primarily a screenwriter, other apps are worth investigating because they have some advantages for novelists and book authors. Our favorites among them are Scrivener, which is available for both Windows and macOS and the Mac-only Ulysses. They're also Editors' Choice winners. Beyond those, there are wonderful, inexpensive writing apps that are perfectly suitable for shorter and less structured content, such as articles and marketing copy. When you need help organizing and formatting large amounts of content, however, Final Draft, Scrivener, and Ulysses are the best writing apps on the market.
What's New in Final Draft 12?
As of version 12, Final Draft has a few new and noteworthy features, as well as significant improvements to the Beat Board, ScriptNotes, and the Outline Editor.
Three features worth highlighting are 1) Focus Mode, 2) Track Changes, and 3) a PDF import tool. Focus Mode lets you minimize distractions while working on your script. Track Changes primarily makes the collaboration options in Final Draft better. It works much like other apps that offer Track Changes, with different colors tracking changes of different collaborators, the ability to accept and reject changes individually or globally, and so forth. The PDF import tool lets you upload a PDF and convert it to editable text. When you upload PDFs of screenplays and other scripts, Final Draft interprets the formatting, too. I tested this feature and it worked very well, with only minimal cleanup needed.
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