billwill
Wednesday 16th April 2008 9:26pm [Edited]
North London
6,162 posts
Regrettably I had to forgo comverting my Scriptwriters Toolkit for MS Word on the Mac. It would take £2000 to £3000 worth of effort and there was no way that I could ever get paid for it.
There simply was not enough demand; over the last 3 or so years only about 20 writers with Macs have asked for a Mac version, so at the low "admin fee" of around £13, that would only recover £260.
Scriptsmart is part of my problem.. it's inferior but totally free (but now totally unsupported because the creator left the BBC) and its got unjustified priority listing on the BBC website. My toolkit is actually much older than Scriptsmart (it was originally designed for and used by Marks & Gran to write the well known Alomo sitcoms & drama: Birds of a Feather, Love Hurts etc).
Scriptsmart sort-of works on the Mac, but even on the PC it doesn't do all that my Toolkit does and Scriptsmart is tedious to use. Scriptsmart tries to do all the formats in a single template, so you have to remember different keys for formatting depending on what type of script you are writing.
In contrast I designed the Scriptwriters Toolkit so that you decide beforehand what format you want, then all the keystrokes are consistent, regardless of what script format you are creating. Also the paragraph styles have consistent names, which means that to some extent you can reformat a script into an alternative format, simply by attaching it to a different template in the set.
Alas as well as not working fully on the Mac, my Toolkit also does not work fully on the new MS Word 2007, so if it is to continue I will need to re-vamp it yet again, but actually if I do so I will likely re-do it for free Open Office instead of Microsoft Office,, and as I believe Open Office is available for Apple OS/X as well as Windows and Linux, you might finally get a fully working Scriptwriter's Toolkit for the Mac.
