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In addition to a bunch of bug fixes, Highland 2.6 adds four new features.
What's New
Endnotes! Need to add an aside, or cite your research? Highland 2.6 makes it a snap. Not only do your notes automatically number themselves, they even link in the PDF.
Checklists. Making a list? Checking it twice? Highland 2.6 makes that easier.
Title Page Images We’ve tweaked how images work on title pages so that it’s easier to add a graphic or logo.
Watermarks [PRO] Need to add a simple watermark to your document? Choose Format > Insert Watermark.
Bug Fixes
What's New
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What's New
Revision Mode! [PRO] Track your changes in different colors, complete with stars in the margin. The industry standard for screenplays now available for all documents.
Custom Themes! Build your own themes using our new Theme Builder. You can rename, delete, or share themes from the new Themes Preferences panel.
Drag and Drop Navigator! Reorder your scenes, sections and other elements right in the Navigator.
Title Pages in all Templates We’ve added Title Pages to all templates. This is especially useful for Manuscripts, which can now be made submission-ready entirely in Highland 2.
Printable Gender Analysis Reports [PRO] Want to share your script’s Gender breakdown with others? Now you can turn the Gender Analysis Report into a great-looking PDF.
Word Analysis [PRO] See which words you’re using most frequently, which words aren’t in the dictionary, which words are different between the US and the UK, and even which adverbs you’re using.
Sample Documents Confused about how Highland 2 works? Looking for a starting point to build a document? Pick one from our built-in samples.
Convert to Narrated Script Convert a Screenplay into a Narrated Script, which translates your document into a speakable format perfect for Apple’s built-in voiceover tools.
“What’s New” Window Never miss a feature update! We’ll let you know when we fix or add cool things to the app.
Improvements
UI Refinements We’ve tweaked quite a bit, including new chromeless windows and a redesigned Launch screen..
Video Tutorials Learn how to use all of Highland 2’s features with new videos accessible from the Launch screen.
Interruptible Sprints Sometimes you need to bail on a Sprint early. Highland 2.5 records your progress up to that point, so you don’t have to worry about losing progress.
Custom alignments in HEADER and FOOTER Love a template, but need more control over Headers and Footers? You can now add forced alignment markup to Headers and Footers.
New Manuscript options Highland 2.5 can automatically pad section headings and remove the indentation from the first paragraph of a section. Manuscript is also now available in Basic.
Simplified Cheat Sheet We’ve merged the Fountain and Markdown Cheat Sheets to create a single reference for writers. It now works offline as well.
Superscripts Need to throw in some algebra? We’ve got you covered. Just use the caret notation to create superscripts, e.g. a^2 + b^2 = c^2. [Shoutout to Pythagoras]
Better Dual Dialogue Formatting We’ve tweaked how dual dialogue is printed in Screenplay PDFs. We’ve also improved character highlighting of dual dialogue, both in the Editor and the Preview.
Forced Page Break behavior more consistent Forced Page Break markup now always means “start on the next page,” resulting in fewer blank pages. (If you want to insert a blank page, you can still do so with two forced page breaks.)
Table of Contents links in PDFs For PDFs, Table of Contents creates links within the document. Handy!
Links in Script templates Script templates now support links in the form of title.
Bug Fixes
What's New
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This is a major update! You’ll notice quite a few changes.
What’s New
But there’s more!
Bug Fixes and Improvements
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What’s New
_) for underlining+) is automatically removed if you hit + on an already highlighted textBug Fixes and Improvements
What’s New
<p> tags.What’s New
Fountain & Markdown file handling. Sometimes you’re working with Fountain or Markdown files, and you don’t really want to convert into .highland.
Starting with this release, we’re making Fountain and Markdown files directly editable once again. That is, if you open a .fountain or .markdown file, Highland 2 won’t automatically convert it into .highland. When you save, it will still be the same format as when you opened it.
You can also explicitly create a plain text document with the aptly-titled New Plain Text Document command under the File menu.
.highland Quick Look. This update includes a Quick Look plugin for .highland files, so you’ll be able to preview them from the Finder as you could with .fountain.
User interface tweaks. We’ve added delete buttons the Bin and Asset panel items to make deleting items more discoverable.
Bug Fixes and Improvements
What’s New
One last file format change. We recently introduced the .highland bundle file format, but many users were finding it difficult to transfer .highland files over the internet.
To make these files easier to use, we’ve modified the format to be based on the zip compression format, rather than a folder.
Forced page numbers Sometimes you really need to renumber the pages. For example, if you have a dedication page after your title page, you probably still want the first page of your script to be 1. Now you can do that.
{{PAGENUMBER: 1}}
Will make the current page 1, and start counting from there. (Any integer will do, so you could start at 16 if that’s what you need.)
If you set the page number to something that’s not an integer, it will stay that way until you change it.
Assets panel improvements. First, you can now QuickLook items in the Assets panel. Just select the item and hit space (same as in the Finder) and you’ll get a system generated QuickLook of the item.
Second, you can now rename assets directly in the sidebar. Select an item, then click on its name and you can edit it in place. Any usage of that asset in your text document will be updated to match the new name.
Bug Fixes and Improvements
What’s New
Sidebar Changes! You’ll notice a new folder icon in the sidebar, which replaces Links (for Markdown documents) and Characters (for Fountain documents). Now, no matter what kind of document you’re working on, the icons will be consistent.
The new panel is called Assets, and shows a list of all images and files you’ve imported into your document.
Updated Character Highlighting list. We’ve moved the Character Highlighting list into its own window, now accessible from the “Tools” menu command. We also show you how many lines each character has, and their first page with dialogue.
UI tweaks. We’re working on cleaning up the interface, standardizing labels, and adding remaining polish to the app.
What’s New
New file format! We’ve added a new package format for Highland 2. Instead of ending with a .fountain or .markdown extension, files will now end with a .highland extension by default.
As always, Highland 2 will happily open .fountain and .markdown files. But in order to allow for support of all of the app’s features, these files will be treated as converted documents, just like PDF or .fdx files.
We have four main motivations behind this changing to a package format.
When you double-click a .highland file, it opens in Highland 2. That seems good and obvious. But with .fountain and .markdown, users couldn’t always predict what would happen.
The .highland format is based on the standard .textbundle Markdown format, and we’re going to publish the full spec when the app is ready.
Milestones. Highland 2 has long had a “Goals” feature, allowing users to set short term writing goals. We’ve now expanded this feature to keep running track of your goals and progress. We now call this feature Milestones.
Progress reports. Now you can see your progress for both Milestones and Writesprints across all your documents. Just hit the “View Report” button in the Stats sidebar panel or from the Writesprints popover.
PDF includes
Highland 2 now allows you to INCLUDE PDFs. Simply drag them in from the Finder. You’ll get a line that looks like this:
{{INCLUDE: french-title-page.pdf}}
When you print or preview, Highland 2 will insert the entire PDF.
What’s New
Flexible Title Pages. Fountain’s default title pages work well for most screenplays, but there are times when you want a little more control over where text is placed. So we’re letting you do that.
You can think of the title page having six regions, each with its own name:
TL - Top Left TC - Top Center TR - Top Right CC - Center Center BL - Bottom Left BR - Bottom Right
What’s New
Getting Started. We want to make it as easy as we can for new users to started with Highland 2, so we’ve added a Getting Started system to walk people through the key features of the app.
TouchBar support. If you have one of the new fancy pants MacBook Pros, Highland 2 now fully supports the TouchBar.
Bug Fixes and Improvements
What’s New
What’s New
Saving the cursor position is now a setting. We’ve added a checkbox to the Preferences that lets you control this behavior. It defaults to off. So now you must opt-in to saving the cursor position.
Flexible scene numbering. Sometimes you find yourself needing to number elements that aren’t strictly Scene Headers. For example, in a montage, each line might merit its own number. So we’re trying a new feature.
You can now number any element (except transitions and right-aligned elements). Just add #number# to the end of the line.
Characters sidebar panel fixes. We’ve fixed the Characters sidebar panel so it updates correctly, and added back in the ability to highlight dialogue in PDFs.
Tweaks to scene header auto-capitalizing. We’ve updated Editor Preferences to read “Auto-uppercase INT. and EXT. scene headers.”
The new wording is because we’ve removed auto-uppercasing of forced scene headers (such as “.kitchen”). Here’s why: There are times when you want to be able to add ellipses to the start of a line, which would lead to unwanted (and unexpected) uppercase. If you’d like your forced scene headers uppercase in the Editor you’ll have to type in caps, or hit Shift-Return at the end of the line.
Scene headers -- both regular and forced -- will still be uppercase in the PDF regardless.
Brighter invisible characters. If you use “Show Invisibles” to see the formatting marks in the Editor, we have brightened those characters across all themes.
What’s New
Rearranged Launch Screen. We tweaked the UI on the launch screen, and added a button to let you open a selected file from the recent documents menu. (You can still open files by double-clicking on them in the list.)
Improved Cheat Sheets. The cheat sheets are now web-based, which allows us to make changes without having to release a new version of the app.
Table of Contents customization. A while back we added table of contents support by adding the {{TOC}} directive. It compiles all your section headers into an outline and adds it to your document, complete with page numbers. Handy!
The TOC directive now allows you to specify exactly which heading levels to including. For example, if you only want # and ### headings (but no others), you would use the following directive:
{{TOC: # ###}}
Fixed RTF export. For people that need it, we’ve fixed some of the RTF export issues. Please let us know if you still come across any problems.
What’s New
MAX PERFORMANCE!!! We’ve cleaned up a lot of things behind the scenes to make the Editor faster and more efficient. It uses less energy in the background and handles longer documents much better.
What’s New
Bug Fixes and Improvements
What’s New
Saved cursor position. When you reopen a file, Highland start up exactly with your cursor where you left off.
Selected word count. The Statistics panel will now count the number of words in a selection.
Print paragraph numbers. We’ve changed the “line numbering” feature of previous builds in order to make it more useful to editing documents. Now we number paragraphs in the editor, instead of lines, and give you the ability to print the paragraph numbers in PDFs.
Updated Themes icon. The old icon was a gear, because we used to have more settings in there. Now it’s just themes, so we updated the icon to reflect that.
Bug Fixes and Improvements
What’s New
Automatic scene numbering. Under the Format menu you’ll now find Add Scene Numbers and Remove Scene Numbers. Scenes are numbered sequentially. You can re-run this command to update the numbering after you insert or remove any scenes.
Styles wrap around paragraphs. If you select multiple paragraphs and apply a style (bold, italic, etc.) Highland will now wrap each paragraph separately.
New Control in Preview. A lot of people have asked for a button to save PDFs, so we’ve added that to Preview, along with an option to include your synopses in your PDFs.
Themes. The theme popover now organizes themes in Light and Dark categories. We think this looks nice and makes it easier to find what you’re looking for.
Improved Lists. We love making lists. To-do lists, grocery lists, lists of cool looking dogs, etc. We’ve improved how Highland handles multi-level (indented) lists in Markdown.
Assemble!. A while back we added the ability to “fold in” documents using {{INCLUDE}}. Whenever you print or preview, these external documents are included inline.
But sometimes, you want to combine all those external pieces into one big editable file. To make this process easier, we’ve added an Assemble menu command (under the File menu). It creates a new document with all the included files.
In addition, we’ve cleaned up some encoding, so files you {{INCLUDE}} with spaces in the title no longer need ‘%20’ like web URLs do. (But ‘%20’ still works.)
Bug Fixes and Improvements
What’s New
Welcome Screen. Highland now opens with a proper launch screen with quick access to your most recent documents and the latest news about the app.
Plus, it’s pretty.
Globalization (of WriteSprints). Previous versions of Highland had WriteSprints tied to individual document windows. This was unnecessarily restrictive, so WriteSprints now work app-wide.
What’s New
What’s New
Markdown and Fountain cheat sheets. Finally. You’ll find them under Help.
In Markdown and Plain Text templates, you won’t see scene headers in the Navigator.
Command-click an included file in the Navigator to open it in a new window.
Added all-new \strikethrough formatting. (suggested by Matt Bischoff)
Improved special character escaping. In general, you can use a backslash () to print any character that would otherwise have special meaning in Fountain or Markdown.
New theme: Classic! We’ve also renamed some of the other themes.
All of the Markdown templates have been tweaked to improve typography and grid-ness. In general, we’re trying to get more useful differentiation between #, ##, and ###.
For people using macOS 10.12 Sierra, we’ve fixed the window weirdness that was affecting people. However, we’re still working with Apple to fix PDF previews. Thanks for your patience.
What’s New
Font options for Manuscripts. Manuscripts are often written in either Courier or Times New Roman, depending on the preferences of the writer, editor, and publishing house.
FDX fixes. We’ve made some improvements to how Final Draft FDX files are imported and exported.
What’s New
Graphic Novel and Multi-Cam templates
Our Multi-Cam template is based on scripts from CBS three-camera shows like How I Met Your Mother and Big Bang Theory.
Graphic Novel scripts come a wide range of formats -- there are no industry-wide standards. We based our template on the most common one we’ve seen.
What’s New
Table of Contents! Highland can now generate a table of contents for Markdown files, on the fly, using a new {{TOC}} directive. This will:
What’s New
Bug fixes. Lots of bug fixes including crash fixes, spacing of dialogue in files exported to Final Draft, and better syntax highlighting.
Template updates. We went through each of the available templates and improved the fonts and sizes.
Updated app icon. We want Highland 2 to look beautiful in your dock.
What’s New
Text Highlighting. In addition to bold, italics, and underlining, you can now highlight. You’ll find Highlight under the Format menu, or you can do it manually using the +highlight+ syntax.
Fountain Character Highlighting. In the Characters sidebar panel, you can now choose to highlight a specific character’s dialogue. Just click a character’s name in the list. Highland will automatically add a color to their dialogue both in the editor and the preview.
Sort Characters by Order of Appearance. In the Characters panel you can now sort the list by Order of Appearance, in addition to the previous options of alphabetical and by number of lines. Even better, Highland will remember your choice for any new documents.
What’s New
Navigator update. We’ve tweaked the navigator to give you more information about your document. Included files are now shown in the navigator, and we’ve moved the UI for filtering into a popover. Click the eye to see more (or less) of your document.
Bug fixes. We’ve been trying to track down all the remaining random crash-resulting bugs. If you run into crazy crashes, please let us know ASAP.
What’s New
Sprint. Sprints are timed writing sessions. They’re great for helping you focus on getting your work done. Just set the number of minutes you want to write, and Highland will show you how much time you have left.
You’ll find it in the far right of the header tool bar.
Markers. The original Highland had markers to help people jump around in their documents. Many beta testers have written in asking us to add this back into Highland 2, and now we have. Please note, we’ve changed the syntax from Highland 1: markers are now {{%m}}. (Curly braces rather than straight brackets.)
Bin undo/redo fixes. As you can imagine, the Bin is super-complicated under the hood. Undo and Redo for the Bin had issues. We think we’ve got all those problems straightened out.
Crash fix. Some testers experienced weird crashes while typing in the previous build.
What’s New
Templates. From the very first beta, the template chooser has shown only grayed-out, unavailable options. Until now!
For Markdown documents, we’re happy to introduce eight new templates:
For Fountain documents, we’ve added Stageplay.
INCLUDE. Many writers prefer to break their projects up into smaller chunks. We’ve added a new way to do that in Highland. It’s called {{INCLUDE: }}, and it’s really powerful.
Bug Fixes and Improvements
Fountain scene numbers. They work again! This is the format: #43#
No headers or footers on the first page. By default, headers and footers now start on page two. If you want one on the first page, you will need to add a {{HEADER: }} or {{FOOTER: }} to the top of your document.
Auto-complete bug fixes for both character names and locations. We think we’re close. If you encounter weird issues, please let us know.
Turn off auto-complete. We’ve added a checkbox in Preferences to let you turn off auto-complete altogether.
More-accurate page count and readability stats.
What’s New
Images. In keeping with the Markdown spec, you can now add images to documents. For example:
Headers and footers. You can now add custom headers and footers to your Fountain and Markdown documents using {{HEADER: }} and {{FOOTER: }}.
Term Lists (new syntax!). Sometimes you want side-by-side items for things like cast lists or definitions. We’ve come up with a handy syntax for you to use: Term::Item
Right-aligned text (new syntax!). Add a > to the end of a line and it will be shifted all the way to the right margin.
What’s New
Bin update. In addition to some UI tweaks, we’ve also added the ability to create empty Bin items by clicking the “+” at the bottom of the Bin. (You can use these as index cards if you like, then Export it as a new document. Handy!)
New Bin commands. From the edit menu, you can finally Cut to Bin (Opt-Cmd-X) and Copy to Bin (Opt-Cmd-C). As always, you can double-click any Bin item to expand it to a fully-editable popover.
Markdown link conversion. Two new commands at the bottom of the Format menu allow you to convert links from inline to reference format document-wide -- including wrapping “naked” URLS in Markdown syntax.
Removed the Locations sidebar panel. The more we thought about it, the less useful the Locations panel seemed. The Navigator enables you to quickly see all the scene locations in your script, and gives you the additional ability to filter Locations and jump to each use of it in your script.
Updated Statistics panel. With Locations gone, we now have the Statistics panel for Fountain documents as well as Markdown. Since word counts aren’t particularly useful in screenplays, we’ve also added the ability to set page count goals!
What’s New
Fixed memory leaks. We’ve plugged many holes.
Export sidebar content. At the bottom of every sidebar panel, you’ll find a little box-with-arrow button. Use it to create a new document with the contents of the sidebar.
New sidebar UI for Markdown links. We love Markdown links, but they can make be a hassle to manage. To help keep things tidy, the Links panel now shows all the Markdown-formatted links in your document.
Better auto-completion. We’ve made tremendous progress in improving how auto-complete works.
Improved document opening speed. Your documents should open a bit faster now.
Copy and paste fix. There was a bug causing the app to crash if you copy and pasted over a Markdown link in the document. Fixed!
Default theme change. “Linen” is now “Clean.” We’ve switched the sidebar to a lighter color to match the theme overall.
Editor settings moved to the View menu. In the previous build, editor settings like “Show Invisibles” were in the same popover as Themes. Based on your feedback, we’ve decided to move these settings back to the View menu, where they were previously.
Accents now work! Génial! Great news for all our international users, we’ve got accents working in Highland again.
Auto-completion improvements. The (extremely annoying) bug preventing deleting letters from an auto-completed character name or location has now been fixed. Yay!
Screenplay Live Margins better match PDF line breaks. A lot of people have asked for the Live Margins setting in the Editor to give a better estimation of what the printed PDF will look like, so we did that. Because the printed PDF text column is fairly narrow, you'll need to set the Editor column width to Narrow in the Preferences.
Resizable sidebar text. Several people wrote in to tell us that the sidebar text was too small, so we've added the ability to select different text sizes from the app's Preferences window.
Tweaked themes. The text selection colors for most of the templates have been tweaked to make it easier to see what’s selected.
What’s New
Themes Refreshed. The sidebar now matches the Editor theme. We’ve also added a new Dark Mode theme, for people that love black backgrounds.
Automatic List Numbering. We love making lists. Character lists. Scene lists. Grocery lists. To make listing easier, we auto-insert the next item in a list you’re writing, and now we’ll do re-numbering of the list to make it easier to add items to existing lists.
Bug Fixes and Improvements
So many bug fixes. Notable fixes include:
New template/format popover. We’ve come up with a streamlined interface to choose what type of document you’re writing. We’ve also renamed some of our templates.
Settings popover. In addition to Themes, we’ve moved many of the settings from the View menu to a new Settings popover (the gear icon) on right edge of the header bar.
The Scratchpad is saved! Many of you wrote to tell us how you were using the Scratchpad and urged us to keep it. So it’s gonna stay.
Dark sidebar. Probably the most requested feature has been a dark sidebar to match the darker themes, so that’s what you’re getting.
What’s New
Auto-hiding toolbar. Turn on Auto-Hide Toolbar from the View menu to have the toolbar automatically disappear while you begin typing. This is especially nice in full-screen mode, where it can now just be you and your words.
Typewriter Scrolling. “Typewriter mode” keeps the insertion point near the middle of the screen.
Line Numbers. Sometimes it’s helpful to have lines numbered, so we added an option to the View menu to show line numbers.
Bug Fixes and Improvements