Chapter 22 · Formats
Television Layout: US and UK
A television script is a screenplay with a skeleton. Acts, sequences and act-outs carry the structure, and much of what makes a TV page look like one is convention rather than rule. This chapter covers the elements that carry that structure, the two layout switches that change how the page reads, and which of them reaches your exported script.
Where television format lives
There is no separate "television" project type, and you do not need one. Television is written in the screenplay editor, which a Film / Screenplay project opens for a pilot or a one-off, and which every episode of a Series project opens too. If you are writing a show, choose Series: the episodes share one Story Bible, and the project type is fixed once the project exists (Chapter 2).
Everything below applies to both. The six everyday elements, the Tab and Enter cycle, and the automatic scene-heading and transition rules are Chapter 16. This chapter is the part of the element menu a feature script never touches.
Act marks: New Act, Sequence, End of Act
Three elements carry act structure, and they live in the element menu on the Home tab, below the numbered six:
| Element | What it marks |
|---|---|
| New Act | The start of an act. ACT ONE, ACT TWO, TEASER, COLD OPEN, TAG. Whatever your show calls its parts, this is the element that names one. |
| Sequence | A group of scenes inside an act. Optional, and worth having on a script whose acts run long. |
| End of Act | The act-out. END OF ACT ONE. |
All three print centred, in capitals, bold and underlined, with generous space above and below. Type them in whatever case you like; the capitals are applied for you.
There is no keyboard shortcut for them. The numbered shortcuts cover the everyday six, ⌘1 Scene Heading through ⌘6 Transition. You type a dozen scene headings an hour and four act marks an episode.
What they give you is the Enter key, pointed where a television script goes next:
- Enter after New Act or Sequence starts a Scene Heading, because an act opens on a scene.
- Enter after End of Act starts a New Act, because the line after an act-out is the next act.
Tab out of any of the three lands in Action, because a writer tabbing out of an act mark wants to be back in the script, not eleven presses around a longer cycle.
Cast List and Shot
Cast List is the cast block at the head of an episode: full width, capitals. Shot is a camera direction on its own line, also in capitals. Both behave like Action for Enter and Tab, so either one followed by Enter puts you back in the script.
Seeing the shape: structure lines
The Script tab carries a checkbox labelled Structure. It draws coloured bands down the left margin, one colour per act, cycling through eight colours. A Sequence adds a second, thinner band inside its act's, and the top of every act, sequence and scene is rounded so you can see where a region opens.
The bands are peripheral by design. You are meant to notice, without looking up, that act two is twice the length of act one. Two things worth knowing:
- The regions come from the script itself. An act runs until the next act mark; a sequence runs until the next sequence or act. Nothing has to be kept in step by hand, because there is no separate outline for the bands to drift away from.
- A script with no act marks still gets bands, coloured per scene. If every scene is a different colour, that is the fallback telling you there are no acts yet.
Structure lines never print. The setting is saved per document, so turning them on for one episode does not turn them on for the rest.
The UK TV style box
Also on the Script tab: UK TV style. UK and BBC television scripts are set differently from American ones, and this box moves the writing surface toward that convention. With it on:
- scene headings sit in a tinted panel with letter spacing and extra room above, the boxed slugline a British script uses;
- dialogue runs wider, about 44 characters instead of the American 35;
- character cues get extra space above them, so speeches breathe.
It is saved against that document, so a BBC-format episode can carry it while the American co-production in the next project does not.
It changes the screen and nothing else. UK TV style is a preset for the writing surface. It does not reach your PDF, your Word file, your Final Draft or Fountain export, or the page count, all of which use the industry screenplay measurements whatever that box says. If the delivered script has to carry a house layout, set it in the destination application after export. Chapter 17 covers the production state that does travel.
Single-camera and multi-camera
The other layout switch is the Script layout menu on the Home tab: Single-camera and Multi-camera. Single-camera is standard screenplay format and the default. Multi-camera is the sitcom layout: character cues and parentheticals centred, dialogue wider and double spaced, action in capitals, and scene headings underlined on screen.
Multi-camera is a document setting rather than a different format, so a script switches without retyping a line. Unlike UK TV style, it is carried all the way out: the centring, the capitals, the wider dialogue and the double spacing appear in PDF, Word, RTF, ODT and HTML. The page count is re-measured the moment you change the menu, and a multi-camera page holds far less than a single-camera one, so choose the layout before you start counting pages.
What all this does to the page count
The status bar counts screenplay pages the way a screenplay is measured: 12pt Courier at ten characters to the inch, a six-inch text block, 55 lines to the page. Act marks, cast lists and shots cost a full-width line each, and character cues are never orphaned at the foot of a page. Summary, Outline 1 to 3 and Note are left out of the count, because they are left out of the print. Chapter 13 covers the counting, and the screenplay format guide has the page ranges different television lengths usually run to.
What survives the trip out
Act structure travels:
| Destination | What act marks become |
|---|---|
| Final Draft (.fdx) | The paragraph types New Act,
Sequence, End of Act, Cast List and Shot,
uppercased. Importing an FDX brings them back as the same elements rather than flattening a
TV script into scene description. |
| Fountain | Centred text, written as > END OF ACT ONE <. Shot and
Cast List take a ! prefix so capitalised lines are not read back as character
cues. |
| Word, PDF, RTF, ODT | Centred on the page, in capitals, in Courier with the rest of the script. |
Part VIII covers importing and exporting in full, including what a round trip through another application does and does not keep.
When it does not do what you expected
| What you see | What is happening |
|---|---|
| Typing ACT TWO did not make an act mark | Nothing types itself into an act mark.
The automatic rules cover scene headings, which fire on INT., EXT.,
INT/EXT or I/E at the start of a line, and transitions, which need
capitals ending in TO:. Act marks come from the element menu. |
| The structure bands ignore my act break | Same cause. A line that looks like an act break but is typed as Action is Action, and the bands read elements rather than words. |
| ⌘7 does nothing | The numbered shortcuts stop at ⌘6. Use the element menu for everything below Transition. |
| The exported PDF is not in UK layout | UK TV style is a screen preset. See above. |
| The page count jumped by a third | Check the Script layout menu. Multi-camera dialogue is double spaced, so a sitcom paginates far longer than the same words in single-camera. |
| The Script tab has no UK TV style box | You are not in a screenplay document. The Script tab appears for screenplay documents, which includes every episode of a Series project. |
Running a whole show as one project, with seasons, episode order and a Story Bible every episode shares, is the next chapter.
Updated 2026-08-30 · Full contents · Something wrong or missing?