Notes and boneyard

A note is something you write to yourself inside the script: a question, a reminder, an idea for later. The boneyard is text you have taken out of the script but want to keep in the file, such as a scene you cut. Neither one prints.

Maya pockets the key. [[which key?]]

[[Todo: plant it in scene 2]]

/*
INT. LIGHTHOUSE - NIGHT

The scene we cut.
*/

She walks out into the rain.

Notes

A note is any text between [[ and ]]. It can be a line of its own, or sit inside a line of action or dialogue, next to what it is about.

To write one in Calmly Script:

• Type [[. The app closes the note for you, [[]], and leaves the caret inside it.
• Or choose Edit › Insert Note. With nothing selected, it opens an empty note at the caret; with text selected, it puts the brackets around the selection, which turns that text into a note.

The brackets stay in the line, and the note is drawn in a colour of its own. Deleting a bracket is how you turn a note back into ordinary text.

A note can run to more than one line, for example across the lines of a speech. It ends at its ]]. One you never close ends where the file will have a blank line: at the end of its paragraph of action, or at the end of its speech. It does not run on into the rest of the script.

Tags

A note that starts with a word and a colon, such as [[Todo: …]] or [[Maya: …]], has a tag, and a tagged note is drawn in the tag’s colour instead of the usual note colour. There is nothing to set up: a tag exists as soon as you type it.

• Name the tag after a colour, and it takes that colour: [[Red: …]], [[Orange: …]], [[Green: …]], [[Blue: …]], [[Purple: …]] (or Amber, Violet, and the colour names in the other languages the app speaks, such as Rojo or Grün).
• Any other name always gets the same one of those five colours, in every script: Todo is the same colour today and next year, on your computer and on your phone.

The tag is part of the text, so it travels with the file. To any other Fountain app, it is simply a note whose first word ends in a colon.

A colon that is part of an address or a time does not make a tag: [[http://example.com]] and [[12:30 call the producer]] are ordinary notes.

Notes in the Outline

The Outline (View › Table of contents) lists every note under the scene or section it was written in, in its tag’s colour, so the Outline is also the list of what you left yourself to do. Click a note there to go to it.

Boneyard

Everything between /* and */ is in the boneyard. Use it to switch off a passage without deleting it: a line, a scene, a whole sequence. The boneyard runs to its */ however far down that is, blank lines and all, and nothing inside it counts as part of the screenplay: when a file is opened, a scene heading inside the boneyard is not read as a scene heading.

Calmly Script draws the boneyard in a colour of its own, with its /* and */ in the text like any other characters.

Inside a note, /* is just text, and inside the boneyard, so is [[.

How they print

Neither notes nor the boneyard print, in the PDF, in the preview or in a Word document. A line that holds nothing but a note disappears from the page, and a note in the middle of a line is taken out with the space around it, so the sentence closes up. The examples on this page show it: only the two lines of action print.

Exporting to Final Draft is the one exception: there, notes become Final Draft’s own script notes, attached to the paragraph they were written in.