Chapter 24 · Formats
Format Elements: Indents, Spacing, (MORE) and Continueds
Every screenplay element has a place on the page: how far in it starts, how far from the right it stops, how much air sits above it. Skarvia ships with the standard table and most scripts never need anything else. When a producer, a festival or a house style asks for something different, Format Elements is where you change it, and the change moves lines on screen and in the PDF together.
Opening Format Elements
The button is on the Script tab of the ribbon, beside Title Page and Header. It exists only in screenplay documents; a novel, a stage play or a two-lane video script has no Script tab with this button on it.
The dialog has two tabs, Elements and More and Continueds. The left and right arrow keys move between them. On Elements, the list down the left holds the ten elements you can format: General, Scene Heading, Action, Character, Parenthetical, Dialogue, Transition, Shot, New Act and End of Act. Pick one and its settings fill the right side, with a sample line underneath that shows where it will sit. Sequence, Cast List and the five elements that never print are not in the list, and keep their built-in layout.
Indents
Left and Right are in inches, from 0 to 5 in steps of a tenth. They are measured inside the page's text block, which is six inches of Courier at ten characters to the inch, so a Left of 1.0 starts the element ten characters in. The two together can take at most five inches. Ask for more and Skarvia keeps your left indent and shortens the right one until the pair fits; the dialog shows the value it will use.
The defaults depend on the Script layout menu on the Home tab:
| Element | Single-camera (left, right) | Multi-camera (left, right) |
|---|---|---|
| Scene Heading, Action, General, Shot | 0, 0 | 0, 0 |
| Character | 2.2, 0 | 2.0, 2.0, centred |
| Parenthetical | 1.6, 1.9 | 2.0, 2.0, centred |
| Dialogue | 1.0, 1.5 | 1.0, 0.5 |
| Transition | 4.0, 0 | 4.0, 0 |
| New Act, End of Act | 2.0, 2.0, centred | 2.0, 2.0, centred |
Only what you change is stored. Switch a script from Single-camera to Multi-camera and your changes come with it, while everything you left alone takes the new layout's default. An element that is centred by default stays centred between whatever indents you give it. One that is not stays flush left, so Dialogue set to 1.5 and 1.5 is a narrow column, still flush left.
Transitions are worth knowing about. With nothing changed, the screen pushes them flush right while the PDF starts them four inches in. Change a transition's indents and the screen follows the table from then on.
Spacing before, and New Act's page
Spacing before is the number of blank lines above the element: None, 1 line or 2 lines. Out of the box every element gets one, except Dialogue and Parenthetical, which hang straight under their cue with none. Two lines before each Scene Heading is a common house request, and it costs pages, so expect the page count to climb.
With New Act chosen, a Start new page box appears. It is on by default, the way television templates expect: every act opens at the top of a page. Untick it and acts run on after the previous scene. Chapter 23 covers act marks themselves.
Bold, underline and capitals
The Font group holds Bold, Underline and All caps. It is available for five elements: Scene Heading, Shot, Transition, New Act and End of Act. For the rest it is greyed out, showing what the layout does (a Character cue is always in capitals) without letting you change it.
Bold and Underline start off for all five, and the PDF follows that. The editor's stylesheet is less modest: it shows scene headings and act marks in bold, and in Multi-camera underlines scene headings too. So with nothing changed, your scene headings look bold while you write and print plain. Two ways to make them agree:
- To print them bold, choose Scene Heading, tick Bold and press OK.
- To see them plain on screen, tick Bold, untick it again and press OK. That stores an explicit no, which is what takes the bold off the screen.
Underline is drawn under the text only, the way a word processor does it, never the full width of the line.
More and Continueds
The second tab handles the marks a speech picks up when a page break lands inside it.
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Show (MORE) and (CONT'D) | On by default. A speech that runs past the foot of the page ends with the bottom-of-page mark, and the next page repeats the character name with the top-of-page mark after it. Turned off, the speech still breaks only at the end of a sentence and carries on at the top of the next page with no name. |
| Bottom of page | The wording at the foot. Default
(MORE). |
| Top of next page | The wording after the repeated name. Default
(CONT'D). The automatic continued below uses the same wording. |
| Automatic (CONT'D) | On by default. When the last character to speak in a scene speaks again, the cue gets the continued mark, on screen and on paper. A new scene heading starts the count again, and a cue that already says it is left alone. |
Both wordings take up to twenty characters of plain keyboard text: letters, digits, spaces and ordinary punctuation. Anything else is dropped as you save, and a box left empty goes back to its default.
OK, Cancel and the two resets
Nothing you change in the dialog touches the script until you press OK. Cancel closes it and keeps everything as it was. Reset Element puts the chosen element back to the layout's defaults; Reset All to Defaults does that for all ten. Both resets apply only to the dialog until you press OK, so a reset you regret is one Cancel away.
The settings belong to the document, and only its owner can save them. A collaborator who opens the dialog can read the table, but OK is greyed out with the note that the document owner sets the script format. Chapter 47 covers roles.
What the table reaches
The editor's page breaks, the page count, the Typeset PDF, a page lock and the production reports all lay out from this one table, which is why a change here can move a page break. The Word, Final Draft, Fountain and other exports use their own layout and do not carry it. Chapter 54 covers the PDF.
Two things sit outside it. A Dual Dialogue block prints both columns at their own fixed widths whatever the table says. UK TV style on the Script tab changes the writing surface only, and leaves this table and the printed page alone.
When it will not change
| What you see | Why, and what to do |
|---|---|
| Everything is greyed out and a note reads Pages are locked, so these settings stay as they were when you locked. | Lock Pages is on. The lock pinned the table so locked page numbers stay true. Only the bottom-of-page wording can change. Unlock the pages to edit the rest; Chapter 18 covers what unlocking costs. |
| OK is greyed out | You are not the document's owner. Ask the owner to make the change. |
| Bold, Underline and All caps are greyed out | The chosen element is not one of the five that take font settings. |
| The Right indent will not go as high as you typed | Left and Right together are capped at five inches. Lower Left first. |
Your (MORE) wording came back as (MORE) | The box was empty, or held only characters outside plain keyboard text. |
| Indents changed, but one exchange did not move | It is dual dialogue, which keeps its own column widths. |
| The Script tab has no Format Elements button | The document is not a screenplay. Chapter 16 covers the elements this dialog formats. |
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