Celtx: Open Source Screenwriting Beginner's Guide: Celtx won't write your script for you, but it will ensure it has the format and features demanded by the film industry. Learn to use Celtx along with insider secrets of screenwriting and script-marketing into the bargain.

Celtx assists in developing important parts of our story such as characters, props, and thirty-six other predefined production categories.

As this old writer learned decades ago, stories are about people. So, we'll jump ahead this once (at least) and look at how Celtx helps create and then track characters and other categories needed in production. Having defined characters makes writing scripts a great deal easier.

Now is a good time to emphasize that while this book is a beginner's guide to learning and using Celtx, it also features many tips about creating scripts and what to do with them after they are written.

Now, let's look at...

Carry out the following steps for adding manual catalogs:

The new category now appears in the Project Library, as shown in the following screenshot (we've added Food as the category):

Now, an extra step is required. You can tag foods (as in our example) in the script, but you will need to save it as one of the predefined categories. Let's say we have apples and oranges as part of the plot. We save them as Props.

Go to Master Catalog and you'll see apples and oranges listed as Props. Select these by clicking on them (holding down Ctrl for PC or the Command key on Mac lets you select more than one at a time). Drag these selection(s) to Food. Double click on Food and we find our food props now listed. Single click on one of these and blocks appear where...

It's always good to get someone doing the little things, so that we can concentrate on rolling out words. Celtx jumps in, taking care of stuff that otherwise slows us down, stuff such as intuitive formatting. It's like having a staff of production assistants in a box. For example, type a character name, hit the Enter key, and automatically go into the dialog mode without having to select it.

We also get auto-completion of names and scene headings, handy shortcuts, page breaks and pagination, scene numbers, dual dialog, scene management, scratchpad, embedded notes, title page generation, and spellchecking.

Let's play with the time-saving "assistants" listed in the preceding two paragraphs.

Intuitive formatting basically is what Celtx does to keep our fingers moving. The less we have to think about formatting, the easier to keep the old creative juices flowing and the story building.

Open a new film project (all examples also work in the other types of script projects) and look at the example script that I've started below. Follow along by typing it, and we'll see some examples of Celtx doing intuitive formatting for us.

We met the drop-down menu box just over the big script window in Chapter 1. We learned there how important it is in five of Celtx's "six biggies", defining the elements that go into Film, Audio-Visual, Theatre, Audio-Play, and Comic Book projects (Story Board is the sixth type).

Elements such as Scene Heading, Character, and Dialog are the very basics of a script. Get their format right and our script looks (and darn well is) professional. Celtx works hard at doing formatting for us unobtrusively.

Okay, let's analyze what...

Carry out the following steps:

The Scratchpad is a handy place to keep notes and another of Celtx's writing assistants. I have the outline of "Portals" in mine for easy referral.

Carry out the following steps:

That's always been one of my goals as a longtime professional writer, to use it as many times as I could. Celtx's Adapt feature does exactly that. You can, with one click, change formatting on your screenplay to a stage play or a comic book or any of the other formats which Celtx knows (and you can add additional formats as needed). That's pretty powerful.

Okay, I decide "Portals" would make a good comic also. To convert or adapt (in Celtx parlance), click on Script (top menu, see the following screenshot) and then select Adapt To. Then choose Comic Book:

Do a Save As and we have "Portals" now as both a Film project and a Comic Book project. I'll need to go through and add balloon types and a few other things, but everything is already in the correct industry standard comic book format.

PDF or Portable Document Format, developed by Adobe Systems, is the standard format these days for transmitting or printing out screenplays and other types of scripts. Celtx formats your scripts in industry standard formats (that is, for a movie screenplay, stage play, audio-visual script, and so on) and creates a PDF file of the result. However, this is done in an interesting way.

To keep Celtx's footprint (use of resources on your computer) small, formatting is actually done out on the web. This means, when it is time to format, an Internet connection must be live. Celtx sends your script to a server out there somewhere (we don't care where), turns it into a PDF, and returns it to your computer (without saving anything out there, by the way).

For Linux and other tech heads among us (I wave both hands excitedly), this conversion is accomplished using XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language) and LaTeX (my long-time and far away favorite...

Included in Celtx are reversible color-coded Index Cards, yet another type of assistant making your job as scriptwriter easier. Celtx ties these cards to the proper place in your script and puts the scene heading and first 40 or so words of the scene on this electronic "card." You flip the card on the screen to type notes and color code them to follow plot lines. You can also drag and drop them to move scenes around.

What does that mean? Something truly powerful! Let's see for ourselves.

At the bottom of the script window, click on the Index Cards tab, as shown in the following screenshot:

The script window is now full of blank cards; the numbers on the cards correspond to the scene numbers in our script.

This "side" of the cards may be thought of as the "back" (and is for our notes). Ah, then what's on the front? Click on the Show Script button just above the top row of cards. Blap! The cards flip over and we have every single scene in the script with the heading and the...

Celtx excels at tracking changes in our scripts. This is especially important for a shooting script in production. To turn on the revision mode on the top menu bar (top of the Celtx screen), click on Script, and then click on Revision Mode.... The Revision Options dialog box pops up over the script, as shown in the following screenshot:

In the dialog box, you can enter the name of the revision and choose a color. Save the project under a new name, so that previous versions will still be available. Now when changes are made, they are shown in the script in the color that we chose for this revision name (Salmon).

Once the first revision has been made, a revision tool bar appears just above the script as shown in the following screenshot:

Clicking on the green button with the white cross in it creates a new revision. The Revision Options box pops up again and we can change the color and name of the revision. However, be sure to save the new revision under a new name to preserve the...

While Celtx provides us the five standard industry formats, Film, Audio-Visual, Theatre, Audio Play, and Comic Books, we are not limited to them. In case, a different or non-standard format is needed, we can create and save them using the template engine feature.

To create a new template, open Celtx in the one of the five formats discussed previously. Click on the File button on the top menu bar, and then click on Create Template.... A Save Project dialog box appears. Enter the name and save it.

The name of the new template appears as a project type in the list on the splash page as Celtx starts and only opens the documents we want (that is, those created using that template).

To make that a bit clearer, we open a standard format (any of the ones provided), make the changes to the format we want, and then save it as a new template that we can use over and over again.

In this chapter, we met a number of assistants, which Celtx provides to handle drudge work and keep our creativity flowing. Specifically, we learned about tracking characters, plots, and thirty-six other production categories. Also we saw how to make use of intuitive formatting and easy shortcuts.

We explored the power of "write once, use many" with Celtx's Adapt feature and built PDFs of our scripts with the TypeSet feature.

Using the reversible color-coded electronic Index Cards made following plots and changing scenes around a breeze, as was letting Celtx track revisions for us. We learned how using the Template Engine lets us create new project types.

Coming up next, we'll learn about storyboarding, part of several strong aids in Celtx to pre-visualize how our movie or other production will look (this can save you a lot of time in writing coherent scripts).