Detailed review of Sophocles script formatting software.

Sophocles is produced by Sheehan Software, and is distributed directly over the Internet.

You download a trial version from the Sophocles website, and if you like it, you pay to register it. On registration you are given a key which unlocks your package and turns it into the full working version. (There are only a few limitations to the trial version — basically file export is disabled and all printing has a large, obtrusive watermark.) I was using version 1.1 for Windows, which seems to be the only operating system that Sophocles will run on. Registered users can request unlock keys for up to three installations (so you can load Sophocles onto home and office desktops and also a laptop).

The download is simple, and the 1.4MB file takes about 5 minutes to download (assuming a reasonable Internet connection and a 56kbps modem). You simply run the downloaded file to install Sophocles on your computer. You can choose where it locates the new installation, but it always insists on creating (or using an existing) directory named ‘Sophocles’.

Registered users are currently entitled to free upgrades of minor revisions to the package (e.g. version 1.1 upgrading to 1.2). Major version upgrades (e.g. version 1 to version 2) must be paid for.

If you’re using the trial version, a guilt screen displays when you open Sophocles. There is also a short tip-of-the-day (which you can disable if you want to open straight into your work).

The main working screen contains the expected trimmings around the edges: a menu bar and tool bar at the top, a status bar at the bottom, and a scroller on the right. Unexpectedly there's also a large ‘navigation window’ filling the left-hand quarter of the screen. The main script editing window takes up most of the screen, in the centre and to the right.

This is slightly configurable, so you can choose to have extra tool bars at the top and right, and lose the status bar at the bottom. You can also split the navigation window so the the bottom half contains a scene synopsis and notes.

You can’t however remove the scroller on the right or the navigation window at the left. The navigation window can be shrunk to about 20 per cent of screen width; and this is fine in practice, as there’s still plenty of space for the script, but it may offend clean-screen purists!

The script editing window does not display text layout as it will be printed. You configure the display and the printout separately. Perhaps in theory you could get them to match up, but in practice forget about it!

Instead Sophocles has been designed for maximum flexibility in screen display. That was obviously a policy decision in the design of Sophocles; and it’s a good one. It allows you to display more on the screen, resize the window without losing words off the edge, and display paragraph styles in different colours. (So you can recreate the relaxing white-on-dark-blue effect which was popular with old WordPerfect for DOS users; or simply give the background a pale tint to lift the script window out of the surrounding elements.)

You can also choose text and background colours for different paragraph styles — so that act and scene titles stand out more visibly.

If you want to display the maximum text on screen, there’s a compressed display which omits the blank lines between paragraphs. You can also split the editing window in two — with a copy of the script in each — which is useful if you want to write one section of the script while referring to a different section.

For writers who use the screen display to give a page count — so you can estimate the running time — Sophocles displays an actual running time instead (see Other Features below).

There’s an option to reload the script you last opened, so you can get straight back to work as soon as you run Sophocles. It’s a minor quibble but it would be nice if the cursor was at exactly the same point in the text as you left it, rather than ‘somewhere close’.

Sophocles allows you eight paragraph styles:

The Act, Sequence and Custom styles allow freeform text, so you can use them for descriptive notes (and you can also choose not to print them).

Sophocles comes with several standard script formats, plus you can create and save your own. There are basic formats for screenplays and TV scripts, with a couple of stage play formats and some rough-draft layouts which allow space for rewriting. One of the stage formats aligns dialogue to the right of the character name, which is useful for British radio writers. (All these formats are applied during printing — see below for more details.)

When typing, Sophocles makes the basic assumption that action paragraphs always follow scene headers and dialogue.

To create a new scene header, you use Ctrl-I and Ctrl-E as hotkeys and Sophocles inserts INT. or EXT. as appropriate. When you start typing the location Sophocles attempts to complete the description (using previously created locations). Suggestions appear in grey; there’s no pop-up list to choose from. You can accept the suggested location by hitting Tab.

The time-of-day also offers a greyed suggestion based on the letters you start typing. I couldn’t find a list of the basic times-of-day, but it handled DAY, NIGHT, MORNING, AFTERNOON, EVENING, DAWN, DUSK, CONTINUOUS, LATER, MOMENTS LATER and MINUTES LATER with ease. (These don’t appear to be customisable, but obviously you can type in alternatives each time you need them.)

You can change an action paragraph to a character name simply by hitting Tab. As you start the name, Sophocles makes a greyed suggestion based on previous names you’ve used. Hitting an opening parenthesis after a character name creates a tag, and Sophocles will offer greyed suggestions depending on what you start typing. Again I couldn’t find any list of the built-in abbreviations, but it could handle VO, V.O., OS, O.S. and OFF, and you can type others yourself.

Sophocles automatically inserts (continuing) as a parenthetical if the same character speaks twice in a row (rather than adding (CONT'D) after the character name). And it inserts (MORE) and (CONT'D) if it breaks a speech over two pages.

After a character name, Sophocles assumes that the next paragraph will be dialogue, although you can insert a parenthetical by typing the opening parenthesis.

If you hit a double Tab in an action paragraph, it changes to a transition paragraph. Again I couldn’t find a list, but the built-in transitions seem to be CUT TO:, CUT BACK TO:, DISSOLVE TO: and FADE OUT — and if you want anything else, such as an old-fashioned wipe, you can type it in yourself.

Alternatively, if you type these words as an action paragraph, Sophocles will recognise them as a transition and change the paragraph style for you. In this case you can customise the list of words and phrases it recognises for scene headers and transitions.

Sophocles uses a few special hotkeys for editing — Ctrl-I (INT.), Ctrl-E (EXT.), Ctrl-A (new act), Ctrl-Q (new sequence) and Ctrl-T (CUT TO:) — in addition to the standard shortcuts for actions like Cut/Copy/Paste and Save.

The Help covers all of Sophocles’s features, and provides the basic information on how to use them; but I found it lacking in important additional information (such as dual-column layout, and what times-of-day can it handle for scene headings). Occasionally there’s a slight mismatch between the Help and the software, and I found a whole feature in the Help which seems to be missing from the software (the File | Email To and Ctrl-M command), suggesting that the Help is out of date. There’s no manual to print out, and no link to any online technical support.

It’s not really possible to create normal word processor effects with Sophocles. It can force a hard paragraph break; but it can’t create hard spaces or hard hyphens — so a Tab is impossible, and ‘Mr Pennington’ and ‘Miss Harvey-Smith’ are always liable to get split over two lines.

There’s an optional feature to capitalise sentences. But there’s no feature to ensure single- or double-spacing between sentences.

There’s a handy pop-up window for inserting non-keyboard and Continental letters.

When you cut and paste dialogue, a nifty feature automatically inserts the original speaker as the character name above the pasted dialogue. This is great if you’re splitting a speech, and moving part of it to a different location. But it’s a nuisance if you’re trying to give part of a speech to a different character.

You can align dialogue in a dual-column layout, for when two characters speak simultaneously. (But it’s impossible to find out how from the Help; I came across it by accident. You right-click on a dialogue paragraph.) This only works with dialogue however; so it can’t be used to format a documentary script with visuals on the left and commentary on the right.

The searching features are particularly strong in Sophocles. Find and Replace are straightforward, with the nice little addition that you can restrict the search to dialogue, action or scene header (or any combination of these) if you wish.

There’s also a Go-To feature, which enables you to skip to a scene number, a percentage distance into the script, or an estimated running time into the script. And the navigation window enables you to skip to a specified sequence, a scene, or a bookmark within a scene.

Bookmarks are easily set and unset using F2. There’s also a potentially useful feature of being able to group bookmarks in ‘collections’ — which would allow you to bookmark, say, all facts that need checking, and all dialogue that needs rewriting. Unfortunately I couldn’t understand how these collections work, and couldn’t find anything illuminating in Help.

Sophocles has an American-English spell check, and you can add words to its custom dictionary. There’s also an American-English thesaurus.

All the details of script layout are applied when the script is printed. You can change margins, line spacing, capitalisation and underlining for each paragraph style — and save them as a format for future use. You can use these settings to ‘cheat’ the layout and make the script seem shorter.

Printing is straightforward. It defaults to whatever paper size is set in the basic Windows printer configuration — which is useful for Europeans who use A4 paper — and you can override this if you wish. There are no fancy features for watermarks or anything.

The various lists and reports which Sophocles produces have their own Save and Print buttons.

An Options box allows you to configure some general features, such as timed backups and default directories, and also the margins and fonts used in the display (which are different from the margins and fonts used for printing). You can choose whether or not show the estimate of running time on screen, and how much detail to include in the navigation window. A separate pop-up box allows you to customise the text and background colours for the screen display. It would be nice if Sophocles could group all this display configuration together in a single box, rather than splitting it over two boxes.

Sophocles has very limited import and export abilities, and can only read and write standard ASCII, RTF and HTML files in addition to its own proprietary file format. In my experience with ASCII and RTF files, it makes a good job of interpreting ASCII as long as it’s already formatted properly (although it once lost some numerals during an import), but RTF was hopeless and needed huge amounts of reformatting.

The web site says it can also save to PDF format, which is a useful way to send a script for someone else to read on screen or print out. But I couldn’t find this feature (at least not in the Demo version); and I couldn’t find any reference to it in the Help.

You can customise the default directories for file open/save and also for import and export. Alternatively Sophocles can default to the last directory you used — which means you don’t have to change the defaults when you start work on a new project in its own directory.

Page headers and script cover pages are both formatted from the Print Preview.

The cover page editor is straightforward and functional. It gives you five areas of text — top/bottom right/left, and centre — and allows you to adjust the margins and also the placement of the centre block (all in inches). This is sufficient for the essential information needed on a cover page, but it doesn’t allow for any fancy typefaces or illustrations.

Similarly the header and footer editor allows you to specify some simple text (such as the script title) to print on each page.

The navigation and notes windows (both positioned on the left of the script editing area) can be used for the process of developing and organising your story — even before you start writing the script itself.

The navigation window works like a simple outlining tool in a word processor. It normally has four levels: Acts, Sequences, Scenes and Custom. These are displayed in tree form (and you can hide or reveal branches and sub-branches). You create and edit these elements by typing in the script editing window.

Starting with a blank script, you would type in brief titles for the major story stages. Then, as you develop the story, you can add sequences within each stage. Finally you can develop your story into scene summaries, and even add sub-elements within each scene.

The navigation window gives you an overview of how your story develops — and you can use drag-and-drop to re-order scenes.

In the notes window beneath, you can write a short synopsis of each scene, and also make notes of ideas. And if you start thinking up snippets of action or dialogue, you can type them directly into the embryonic script alongside.

You can print this complete outline and notes as an Outline Report.

Sophocles can also generate several lists to help with editing and rewriting a script. The Characters list indicates how much importance each character has, by ranking them according to the number of scenes in which they appear; and also shows how many speeches they have, how many words they speak, and the average length of their speeches. By double-clicking on a character, you can see all their speeches listed together — and you can edit any of them, if you want to ensure stylistic consistency for example. You can also bookmark all the speeches by any character.

The Dyad list shows the relative importance of relationships between pairs of characters by ranking their conversations together. This quickly reveals which relationships are at the heart of a script.

The Scenes list shows the scene headers along with a count of their length and the number of speakers. As you scroll down the list, a panel displays the opening paragraph of each scene along with its synopsis and notes. You can also edit the synopsis and notes here.

Reader’s notes can be added by using the Custom paragraph style, which displays on screen but doesn’t necessarily print out. But there’s no way of optionally hiding them on screen.

When you turn on Production Mode for a script, all the scenes are automatically numbered. After you print out a production script, scene and page numbers are locked, and future changes generate revision pages with asterisks in the margin, ‘A’, ‘B’ and ‘Omitted’ scenes as necessary, and the revision date and colour in the page header. (The asterisk can be changed to some other character, and the slug line at the top of the page can be customised, using the standard colours out of sequence if you wish.)

Changed paragraphs in a locked script are highlighted on screen; and tool bar buttons allow you to jump to the next or the previous revision.

Sophocles can generate several reports for production office use. The Outline report lists all the scene headers, along with the synopsis and notes for each scene. The Statistics report provides masses of numerical analysis, including word counts, average length of scenes, and proportion of interiors and exteriors.

The Characters report itemises all the speaking roles along with a summary of their speeches and the characters with whom they share scenes (although, to be honest, a simple character list would be more useful). Likewise the Locations report not only lists all the locations but also includes details of how much each location is used and the various times-of-day for each. It would be nice if the user could specify how many of these details were included in the report.

There's no tool for numbering speeches for radio or animation production.

A useful feature of Sophocles is that it displays an estimate of the script’s running time, marking every 30 seconds. It calculates this on a word count of dialogue and action (and you can customise these settings if your writing is particularly verbose or terse). The default settings are reasonably good, and it compensates for the lack of a page count on screen. Its strength is that if you change the layout or even cheat the length of a script, you can still see the actual running time. The drawback is that you can’t save several different configurations — say, one for TV script timings and a different one for radio script timings.

You can create a disk with the trial version of Sophocles, so you can pass it on to a colleague.

I found Sophocles completely stable in use — no crashes or freezes of any kind.

Sophocles has been designed with the writer in mind. It has all the basic features you’d expect of a good script formatter and makes typing easier and faster. Plus it has valuable extra features which can be a real help while developing and rewriting the story.

The navigation window gives you a powerful overview of your story, and enables you to develop ideas in note form and organise the structure with ease. And the analytical reports provide surprisingly useful feedback on characters and relationships.

The optional display of running time (if you configure it accurately) is a great help when writing a script to length.

Sophocles is available direct from Sheehan Software as a download from the Sophocles web site. Registration can be done online or by post.

The trial version is exactly the same download file as the full version — but it needs a simple key code to unlock the printing and export functions and turn it into the full version.

One of the promotional claims for Sophocles is that Internet distribution means it’s cheaper than rival script formatters. In reality, at $160 excluding tax (in January 2002), it’s almost the same price as Movie Magic Screenwriter and Final Draft if you buy them from a good discount supplier — and your money for Sophocles doesn’t buy you a bound manual or technical support for Sophocles, and only minimal free upgrades.

Sophocles didn’t have any delivery costs; but it would still have to come down close to $100 — with only nominally priced upgrades — to really undercut its rivals on price.

A Student Discount was available — details from the Sophocles web site.