Highland 2
Final Draft features for a fraction of the price
Free (IAPs) From Quote-Unquote Apps, quoteunquoteapps.com Needs macOS 10.12 or later
Screenwriting app Final Draft rules the entertainment world, and claims to be used in 95% of film and TV productions. It’s very good, but it’s also expensive: $249, or $129 if you qualify for an educational discount. Highland 2 promises to deliver the Final Draft features you need for a fifth of the price, and with some flourishes of its own.
It’s important to differentiate screenwriting, which is a process, from script formatting. You can write and format a script in any writing app – Game of Thrones was written in WordStar 4.0 running on MS-DOS, for example – and many apps have templates that take care of the formatting for you.
What good screenwriting software offers is function as well as form. It should make the actual writing process better, not just make the finished script pretty. And Highland 2 does that in several ways.
The most obvious way is that it formats as you type. Type INT for interior, the name of a character or “CUT TO:” and it applies the correct formatting. It also offers autocorrect for locations and character names, which is a massive timesaver. The navigation bar shows you all your different locations for easy access, and you can use character highlighting to see exactly who does what in your script. We particularly liked Highland 2’s gender analysis tool, which make it easy to see if your scenes and dialogue are perhaps a little too male-centric.
You can import and automatically convert script PDFs (ones containing editable text, not scanned text: Highland doesn’t have OCR), Fountain and Final Draft documents, and you can export in those formats, as well as in Markdown, Textbundle, plain and formatted text.
There are some things it can’t do. It lacks Scrivener’s ability to store and organize every passing thought, plot idea and bit of research for any conceivable kind of writing, and it doesn’t have Final Draft’s collaboration tools, beat sheets, alternate dialog or story mapping. What it does have, though, is a fast, flexible and customizable workspace that’s a joy to use and makes writing any script a much better experience.
the bottom line. Highland 2 is a joy to use and makes the process of writing any script much more pleasant.