Advanced Formatting

After you’ve familiarized yourself with the basic screenplay formatting elements and how to format them in Arc Studio Pro, we’ve collected some advanced formatting tips and tricks below. You will learn about:

Formatting individual paragraphs (alignment, page breaks, margin…)
Dual Dialogue
Enabling automatic CONT'D in dialogue
Customizing your basic writing flow
Adding TV script elements (act breaks)
Customizing elements & creating custom elements
Adding and editing scene numbers

Formatting individual paragraphs

To adjust the formatting of an individual paragraph, select “Formatting” in the element menu, or hit Cmd + Opt + F / Ctrl + Alt + F.

Dual Dialogue

To create a dual dialogue, put the cursor on a character, open the element menu and select “Make Dual” or hit Cmd + Opt + U / Ctrl + Alt + U

Automatic CONT'D

We don’t enable automatic CONT'D, because we feel CONT'D markers should only be added if the action does not interrupt the dialogue (i.e. if the speech is truly continuous).

If you prefer to have CONT'D markers added automatically, you can do so in the document menu in the formatting tab.

Customizing your basic writing flow

You can select if you want to continue with Dialogue or with Action by default in your settings:

Adding TV script elements

You can change the template to TV script in the document menu. This will add Act break elements to your element menu.

Customizing elements & creating custom elements

To add customize elements, or customize existing ones, find the “Edit Formats” button in the Document menu.

You will be able to adjust all the parameters that define an element’s formatting, which will be applied to every element in your script.

Scene numbers

You can add scene numbers in the Scene sidebar at the very top:

We will automatically add all missing scene numbers. Scene numbers between consecutive existing numbers will receive letters as extensions, e.g. the scene between 12 and 13 will be 12A.

Scene numbers

You can add scene numbers in the Scene sidebar at the very top:

We will automatically add all missing scene numbers. Scene numbers between consecutive existing numbers will receive letters as extensions, e.g. the scene between 12 and 13 will be 12A.