Hot on the heels of Fountain, a screenwriting tool that could become a standard, John August has announced "Highland," a Mac app that takes the headaches out of screenwriting file types. Though it's still in beta, Highland could become the go-to app for converting between Fountain, Final Draft, and PDF. I'll let John explain in this walk-through video:
These are the main features of Highland:
- It creates perfectly-formatted PDFs from Fountain or FDX files.
- It creates future-proof Fountain files you can edit in any text editor.
- It melts PDFs, making them editable.
Basically, it's a Swiss Army knife for file formats. As I've said before, I have had plenty of trouble working with other screenwriters and dealing with differing file types, and Highland looks to make this a piece of cake. John also points out at the bottom of his post that Highland will be able to convert old .fdr Final Draft files into something usable.
Right now Highland is only beta, but if you sign up, and you've got plenty of scripts lying around, you could be picked to test it out. There isn't a timeline for release yet, but I have to imagine that if they are already in beta, release isn't too far around the corner. No word yet whether it will stay a Mac only app, or if it will eventually be ported to the PC.
Screenwriters, do you think you'll find a place for Highland in your toolbox?
Link: Highland - The Screenplay Convertor for Macintosh
[via John August]
