Today is a big day.

Ever since we released Slugline, the most frequent request we’ve had was to get Slugline on iOS.

It took a long time, because we wanted to do it right. We realized that we needed to re-write scrolling, so it would be fast and smooth. We knew we had to speed up pagination. We wanted to support fancy new iOS 11 things like split-screen and drag-and-drop.

We did all those things. And now Slugline for iOS is available in the App Store for $19.99.

Some of our favorite things about Slugline on iOS:

• Native sync with iCloud and Dropbox.
• Intuitive, best-in-class outlining, just like on the desktop.
• Dark mode, for going dark places.

So, if you’ve loved Slugline on Mac, we hope you’ll give it a try on iOS. If you like it, we’d be grateful if you’d spread the word, or maybe write a review. And if you have any suggestions for what we should be working on next, well, now you know we really are listening!

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Slugline on iPhone X, notchurally.

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Hello darkness my new friend.

To help you keep your writing organized and your ideas flowing, Slugline uses Fountain’s simple, embedded Notes. Like everything in Slugline, they are just plain text. But they have some superpowers, such as optionally appearing in the Outline Navigator, and, of course, not printing in your final screenplay.

But what if you want them to print? Here are three ways to do that, including a free applet for generating a Notes Report from a Fountain Screenplay.

A Slugline Notes Refresher

Slugline’s Notes are wrapped in [[double brackets]], and are highlighted in sticky-note yellow. They can be in-line with any text in your screenplay outside of the Title Page, or they can be on their own line. You can create Notes by manually typing the brackets (even in an app other than Slugline!), but there are some shortcuts that make managing Notes even easier.

• If you type the two open brackets [[, Slugline automatically creates the closing pair ]] and places the insertion point inside.
• Press ⌘Y to create a new, empty Note.
• With the insertion point inside a Note, press ⌘Y to delete the brackets, which converts the Note to normal text.
• If you’re typing at the end of a Note and you press Return, Slugline will move the insertion point to just after the Note.
• With the Outline Navigator visible (⌘3), you can show/hide Notes in the Outline by pressing ⌘7.

You can use these notes however you like. They are meant just for you, the writer, so they don’t show up in Preview or Print — just like ScriptNotes in Final Draft, for example.

Still, it might be useful to print these kinds of notes every once in a while, so here are some methods for doing just that.

Synopses: Like Notes, But Optionally Printable

Notes don’t print, but there's something similar to a Note that can optionally be printed: A Synopsis element. Synopses join Sections in forming Slugline’s powerful built-in outlining.

• Sections start with pound signs, and are hierarchical. A Section that starts with ## is considered to be nested within a Section that starts with #.
• Synopses start with an equals sign =.

Both Sections and Synopses are invisible in print by default, but Slugline has a special option to print them if you like. This setting is saved with the screenplay itself.

Typically, a Synopses follows a Section element, like this:

But you can also place a Synopsis element anywhere in a scene:

If you get in the habit of making your Notes this way, with Synopsis elements, then you can toggle their printability using File → Document Settings → Include Outline Elements.

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Just remember that including these elements will affect your page count.

Generate a Notes Report

Final Draft doesn’t support printing its notes inline, but it does allow you to generate a “Notes Report.” Through the power of plain text, it’s easy to do the same with Slugline.

Since Notes contain double brackets, it’s easy to filter for them. I created a simple “droplet” application that does just this, and saves the results to a plain text file. This is basically a bare-bones app wrapped around the Unix grep command, if you’re curious.

The only downside is that there are no page or scene numbers in the report. Still, it can be very handy to have all your notes, and just your notes, in a separate, printable document.

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This app takes the Screenplay on the left and generates the Notes Report on the right.

Printing Notes Inline

Still, the dream of many is to print Slugline’s Notes right in place. And again, thanks to the power of text, that’s a pretty straightforward thing.

Remember that the [[double brackets]] are the trigger that Slugline uses to highlight your Notes, and to ignore them at printing time. Since these brackets are just text in your document, and since it’s unlikely that your screenplay has sets of double brackets that aren’t related to Notes, all we have to do is search and replace them with something else — ideally something easy to search and replace back into brackets!

You could do this with Slugline’s built-in Find and Replace (under Edit → Find), or you could use a free and handy app called MassReplaceIt from HexMonkey Software.

MassReplaceIt lets you batch search/replace multiple matches in multiple files at once. It writes its changes back to the input file(s), so here’s a big, fat warning:

Always make a copy of your screenplay before you try this!

Here’s how I have MassReplaceIt set up:

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I saved these settings in MassReplaceIt as Print Notes and Hide Notes, so that I could recall them easily. Note that for them to work properly, you must turn off Search whole words only under Options.

Run Print Notes on the copy of your screenplay, and here’s what you get:

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Before

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After

All the Notes become regular, printable text. The double asterisks make them bold, so they pop off the page. The asterisks, of course, don’t print:

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Print preview of printable notes

But again, notice that rendering the notes did affect the pagination of our screenplay.

In case you do some important editing in this visible-Notes version of the screenplay, you can always use Hide Notes to put the double brackets back.

Avoiding an Obvious Amadeus Joke

Are any of these solutions the dream-come-true of printing an annotated screenplay? Maybe not. It’s a hard problem to solve elegantly, which is probably why no one has done it yet. But while we think about ways to make this even better, I hope this article serves as a reminder that when you write your screenplays in an open, universally-compatible text format like Fountain, there’s no end to the powerful workflows you might create for yourself.

Slugline version 1.3 is available now in the app store. This free update focuses on performance, Undo behavior, and bug fixes.

But first: Want to get updates like this in your inbox? Sign up for our newsletter! We promise to keep it relevant and low-traffic, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Now, here’s what’s new in 1.3:

• Performance! Slugline scrolls smoother and keeps up with your typing better, even on very large, complex documents.
• Performance! Slugline should be less greedy with your laptop’s battery.
• Undo now un-does blocks of typing, rather than one letter at a time.

Plus some little tweaks:

• Typing the @ symbol, the trick for forcing a Character element, now brings up an auto-complete menu of any forced Characters already in your screenplay.
• After pressing Return to choose a Scene Heading prefix (INT., EXT., etc.) from the auto-complete menu, the cursor now remains on the line, so you can keep typing your Scene Heading.

And some bug fixes:

• Undo-ing the creation of a Character/Dialogue pair no longer inserts random garbage into your screenplay.
• We fixed a potential memory leak. If you noticed Slugline’s RAM usage ballooning over time (especially on macOS Sierra), we expect this update to fix that.
• When reverting to a saved document, the “Loading” spinner should go away now, rather than stay there for four to eight years.

Each new update provides a blank canvas for your generous reviews. We are always grateful when you share your feedback with us, either on the App Store or at here. Happy writing!