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Old 10-07-2011, 07:49 AM   #16
beeftartare
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beeftartare began at the beginning.
 
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Join Date: Oct 2011
Location: Vienna
Device: Nook Simple Touch
Hi alanjay,

Maybe I am a bit late with my reply, but I came across your thread looking for a solution to the same problem – having to read a lot of film scripts which I would prefer to do on my Nook.

I have not made any progress in formating the pdf's but found a "workaround" that works for me, because I know most of the script writers who send me scripts personally...

My solution is to ask the script writer to export the script from Final Draft as an .rtf file instead of a pdf. (Or they send me the .fdr file and I export it myself as an .rtf). I open the file with Pages (meaning the Mac program) and export it from there as an epub.

If I am in the mood I additionally create a zoomed-in jpg of the first page and add that as a front cover in Calibre :-)
(As it is not part of the .rtf, the script writers additionally have to send the first page, though)

There are only two real downsides I have found so far...
1) There is remarkably more space on the left side than on the right side, but the original format of the script itself stays exactly the same (if I am not mistaken) and I can zoom in and out without losing the proper format. After reducing the margins on the Nook to the minimum I can also live with the extra space on the left.
2) The export of the scripts as an .rtf from Final Draft screws up the correct display of upper case and lower case letters, but only those of the characters' names and the locations. I do not have a clue, why that is. It looks a bit weird, but I can get used to it. Maybe somebody has a suggestion how to deal with that (if you do not want to manually correct them in Pages), but it is definitely a problem of the Final Draft export. (With the "Find and Replacement" function in Pages it is a matter of 5-10min correcting the character names, depending on the number of characters.)

What I do not know yet, and what I would be interested in, is, what it looks like on other readers and what happens if you convert it into a mobi file to read the scripts on a kindle.
A friend of mine will soon test it for me on his Sony reader and report back. If you are interested, I can share the results...

The disadvantages of this method of course are...
- you need Pages (I have not found that function to export an .rtf to an epub in Microsoft Word, but maybe somebody can correct me, if I am wrong)
- you need to ask the script writers to send it as an .rtf or .fdr

Except for that I am quite content with the workaround, which takes less than 5 minutes.

Last edited by beeftartare; 10-07-2011 at 10:46 AM.
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