This entry was posted on Sunday, February 26th, 2006 at 9:16 pm and is filed under tech, writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
My Books
Outlaw Territory
(with Melike Acar)
24Seven Vol. 2
(with Walter Pax & Jack Kaminski)
24Seven
(with Ben Templesmith)
Complete story - "The Workman"
(courtesy of New York Magazine)
Final Draft 7 sucks ass
Got hold of a copy. Used it for a week. Hated it. Went back to Final Draft 6.
FD7 has a new PDF-writing engine, which is supposed to improve font support and general readability. I saw absolutely no difference, except that the size of the PDF files it produced had ballooned to near-Photoshop levels. An average script for me is about 40k in PDF form, exported with FD6. Using FD7, that same script is over 2MB(!). That’s, what, a 500% increase in size? With no discernible difference, either on screen or on paper? Fuck that. Also, FD7 got rid of the old Scene Navigator feature (something I use often), and replaced it with something called Index Card Mode — which is like Scene Navigator, except completely useless.
Jaq, man. Why didn’t you warn me?
2 Responses to “Final Draft 7 sucks ass”
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March 24th, 2006 at 1:18 pm
I think it’s part of the fact that each new Acrobat iteration defaults for the new PDFs to be backwards-compatible for *every single version ever made*. I just created PDFs at work, and when I saw a 13-page scanned document was 22MB, something wasn’t kosher in Denmark. You can choose an option under the File menu in Acrobat to Reduce File Size. It clipped the file size in half on most docs I used it on. Not as great a difference as 2MB > 40KB, but it’s a start.
How goes anyhow, man?
March 24th, 2006 at 1:48 pm
Sound advice. Problem is, Final Draft doesn’t use Acrobat’s PDF engine; it has its own (similar to the “Print to PDF” functionality you find in Mac-based word processors) and there are no options for configuring how the PDF is written.
I’ve been told it’s a difference between text-based and image-based PDFs (i.e., FD7’s files are huge because it’s actually creating a high-rez graphical snapshot of each page), but that’s all just semantics at this point. The bottom line is, FD6 does what I want it to do, while FD7 doesn’t.
It’s really only notable because it’s only the second time I’ve ever uninstalled a major upgrade of a commercial software product. (The other time? Windows ME.)
[I've been great, man. How are you?]