Have a review of the screenwriting software Final Draft 8

Final Draft is screenwriting software for writing and formatting a screenplay to meet the screenplay submission standards set by theater, television and film industries. The program is developed and owned by Final Draft, Inc.

The current version, Final Draft 8, was released at the end of April 2009. It contains over 50 movie and television templates, and also allows users to assign computer generated voices to their characters, who then read the script aloud. Other features include CollaboWriter, which allows multiple Final Draft users to collaborate on scripts simultaneously in real-time via the Internet. Final Draft companion applications for the iPad and iPhone are available.The applications work with Final Draft 8's .fdx format.

New Features in Final Draft 8:

1. Scene Navigator-A nice way to see the scenes by title and location and order. This is on the main workspace just like Scene View.

2. Page Count Management-anyone with desktop publishing experience is familiar with tweaking leading, which is the way to adjust the space between the lines in a document. Final Draft now offers this support, and the options are Very Tight, Tight, Regular, and Loose.

3. File Format (XML)-XML is the abbreviation for Extensible Markup Language. In essence, it lets someone define mark-up elements in something, so the data can be used by other products. What does this mean? It means someone can write a script with Final Draft and save it as XML and other applications can access the materials without needing to do a lot of reformatting.

4. Scene Properties Inspector-An easy way to have scene specific information on hand.This is on the main workspace just like Scene Navigator.

5. Scene View-very nice and convenient way to rearrange entire scenes via drag-and-drop. This feature is found in the View menu and it replaces the actual script, so you need to select View - Script - Normal View to continue editing your script.

6. Remember Workspace-Being able to remember and restore previous workspaces for a script. It can be a hassle to try to remember everything you used when switching between scripts when working on more than one at a time, so this feature alleviates that problem. Nice addition.