Final Draft Mobile™

We’ve submitted the Final Draft Reader™ to Apple and it’s approved! Look for us soon in the app store.

We are beta testing and it’s going very smoothly. Thanks to all our beta testers! Your feedback has been invaluable.

Some good news - in Final Draft Reader for iPad you will be able to add ScriptNotes.

When you create a ScriptNote in Final Draft on your desktop... you can open, and edit, that ScriptNote in Final Draft Reader:

Final Draft Reader will allow you to select the type of ScriptNote you wish to add. The ScriptNote types can be customized in Final Draft on your desktop.

[Click the images below for larger versions.]

Also, you can email your script with your ScriptNotes. Once back in Final Draft on the desktop your ScriptNotes and pagination are all maintained properly.

Check back soon for info on our upcoming release date!

As always, thanks for your interest in this app!

We’ve begun early product testing of the mobile reader. Once we fine tune the "edge cases" the reader should handle any .fdx file you make in Final Draft.

Big deal, right?

It may sound trivial to display a Final Draft script on the iPad. However, a number of features in Final Draft must be supported to accurately paginate your .fdx file whether it’s on the Mac, Windows, or the iPad. To give an idea of the complexity of the task, here are a few of the supported features:

• Courier Final Draft font
• Font styles (bold, italic, colors, etc.)
• Support for fonts native to the iPad
• Page break dialogue and action at sentences
• Pagination rules for action, character, slugs, dialog, etc.
• User’s custom formatting
• Accurate margins
• Line spacing settings
• Headers & footers (date, active revisions, labels, collated revisions, etc.)
• Omitted scene label display
• Mores and continueds settings
• Forced page breaks
• Dual dialogue display
• Cast list display
• Tab stop settings
• Revisions (text color, revision marks, various display options)
• Locked (A, B) pages
• Title page pagination (i, ii, iii, etc.)

...and the list goes on.

Stay tuned!

We’ve been getting invaluable input from our friends in the business. Sincere thanks to the execs, agents, producers, directors, creators, and script coordinators who’ve generously given their time. We look forward to the ongoing feedback.

"So what’s new?"

Well, porting of the Final Draft engine is going smoothly. We have encountered a few unique challenges in the iOS environment - but no show stoppers. We are successfully parsing the xml and rendering Final Draft .fdx documents on the device. Now we’ve begun fine tuning the many details that go into proper screenplay formatting: accurate page breaks, line breaks, headers, footers, etc. The good news: Final Draft pagination on your desktop will be the same on your iPad.

Meanwhile, email and file sharing support is in place, and we are testing potential features for release. It’s safe to say that our first release candidate will be a reader.

Our Hollywood users all agree that script notes are essential to their process. So we are weighing a script note feature against the additional development time needed to ensure roundtrip file integrity. We aim to strike a balance between a useful feature set and a reasonable release date for our "first draft" of this app.

Thanks for your continued enthusiasm - we will keep you posted!

We hear the question a lot, "What’s taking you so long?"

Well, believe it or not we already built a down and dirty iPad editor - and decided not to release it. This "rough draft" app was built for use tests and proof of concepts. We ran into some design limitations when importing large files and unique FDX test cases. The architecture did not adequately support our embedded refs (like dual dialog or omitted scenes) or sufficiently maintain our client's strict formatting standards.

So we changed the "roadmap" and opted to build on a more solid foundation:

The Final Draft Engine!

Final Draft is deceptively simple. Over the last 20 years, Final Draft set the industry standard for pagination.

To ensure Final Draft displays the same page on your laptop, your desktop, and on your iPad, we are porting our "Final Draft engine" to the iOS platform.

But yeah, it takes a little longer to do this.

In order to integrate with future Final Draft products, we’ve overhauled the development roadmap of our Final Draft Mobile app. As a result, the app will be released at a later date.

The Final Draft Mobile app for iOS will augment the overall Final Draft user experience, providing our community a seamless creative work flow between the Final Draft desktop client, Final Draft Mobile, and future Final Draft services.

This strategic change in the product’s development will ensure that the Final Draft Mobile app can evolve in a way that will integrate with future Final Draft services and products, such as Final Draft Connect online services, which will provide storage, sharing, versioning and real-time collaboration.

We as a company understand that Final Draft Mobile is highly anticipated, but we know that it is just as important to carefully consider what gets to market as when.