Highland App Reviews

A curious SCREENWRITER stands at a storefront window looking at a shiny, supple piece of software called Highland. He is suddenly and arbitrarily accosted by an UNSOLICITED INFORMATION GUY. UNSOLICITED INFORMATION GUY If you are into plain text screenwriting with .fountain (and you really should be), Highland is an indispensible tool. SCREENWRITER But what can you do with it? INFORMATION GUY Well, I use it all the time to spit out nicely formatted scripts to send to clients. Ill usually be typing something up in nvALT or Sublime Text 2 and then when its time to serve it up I just paste into Highland and BOOM… Beautiful screenplay. SCREENWRITER But why not just use something like Final Draft? INFORMATION GUY Because its written by people who dont care about you. They also dont care about taste, comfort, or quality of life in general. They just dont care. At all. About anything. SCREENWRITER Is there anything you dont like about Highland? INFORMATION GUY Im not a huge fan of the Highland Sans used in the default editor, but it has support for the beautiful Courier Prime. SCREENWRITER Ooo, that Courier Prime looks better than the Courier Im used to. Who made that? INFORMATION GUY Im glad you asked. Its the same people who created Highland. The folks at Quote-Unquote have been doing a great job improving all of the tools that screenwriters use. You can really tell that the people creating the tools are actually using them themselves. They are scratching their own itch, and thats what makes for the best software. SCREENWRITER Thank you for all this information. INFORMATION GUY (tips his hat) That is my role and purpose.

Final Draft has been terrible for years. Highland isnt a replacement for Final Draft, but its a step in that direction. With the groundwork laid by Fountain and the utility Highland provides, I can envision another app coming along to unseat Final Drafts defacto monopoly on the screenwriting software market. Meanwhile, Im using Highland for my screenwriting. Its not fantastic, but its better than the alternative at less than 1/10th the cost. Its great.

I love the whole fountain/markdown idea and this program initially showed great promise (despite the many bugs along the way). It began as a file converter and it does an okay job of that. The promise was that you could edit a screenplay.fountain file in your favorite text editor, then open that file in Highland and view your screenplay as a pdf. This works, until you go back to your text editor, write a few more pages, and then attempt to view them in Highland. No dice. The changes you make in your text editor will not appear in Highland unless you exit Highland and reload the file. This is cumbersome to say the least. This would not be a problem if you could run Highland from the command line, because then you could simply run a script calling Highland from within your text editor, and the new pdf would pop up in whatever pdf viewer you are using, but until then no joy working in your favorite text editor and using Highland. Instead the developers clearly now envision people working in the Highland toy text editor (whose most advanced features are bi-color syntax highlighting and find and replace) and viewing their changes in the Highland viewer. If thats what you want, the program does it.

I mostly bought this app because Im a huge fan of John and his podcast and I wanted to show support. However, I recently got a new job that requires me to review and edit tons of different scripts and treatments from lots of different writers. With this app, it doesnt matter what they wrote it on, they just send me a pdf and I can make the appropriate changes needed. I never thought Id have use for it, but as it turns out it has become an essential part of my work life. Thanks John!

This app just saved my life. My computer died and I lost a script I’ve been working on for 2 months. Luckily, I got back a PDF copy from my email. Ran it though Highland and I got my Final Draft file back! AMAZING!

Man, I never write negative reviews (eg: it killed me to take TWO STARS away from this) but feel like it’s worth putting this one out there. I write/design video games for a living and often times write in a text editor in fountain markup because I can shoot pages around to the team that look like a movie and then get them into an editor or a database with little trouble. Figured I’d use Highland given it’s recen Eddy acclaim and I liked that I could check formatting really quickly (furthermore I’m often writing scripts for traiditional media so figured it’d be nice to have). The thing is, I’ve been working in fountain for five hours, on a brand new Macbook Pro (a few days old), running Mavericks, and this app has crashed a dozen times. Maybe it’s because I’m scrolling too fast with the wheel on a USB mouse? Who knows? It’s still bonkers to me that this app is this delicate — because it’s not doing much. It’s clean and miniamlist but it’s little more than a text editor. I can’t get a line count per character or even a word count for the entire document. I quickly found myself switching back to SublimeText2, a basic text editor, for a rock solid writing environment, a more robust/find replace, and the same syntax highlighting I can get in Highland by quickly grabbing some code found at fountain.io. Thirty bucks? I probably wouldn’t spend that again — but holding out hope that it becomes more feature rich and more stable now that I have!

I bought this so it would format for me and that’s exactly what it did. It works like magic, and also exports to Final Draft and PDF. I definitely recommend it!

I love writing in fountain and Highland is superb for converting my old screenplays to it. Also makes collaborating with someone using Final Draft a piece of cake.

As a pure conversion tool it works great 95% of the time and does exactly what it promises. As an editor, it is pleasant to work in. --- UPDATE: Lots of fixes! Centered text can now have an underscore; transitions now work as they should; fast scrolling doesn’t crash the app; hooray and thank you (one star extra)! We now have auto-split for dialog, with (MORE) and (CONT’D) — nice! One question: margins seem to have changed since the last version, is there an way to modify those somewhere? Hey, why still just three stars? This old issue still stands: while swithing between preview and editing mode, Highland often loses track of where in the script you were and snaps you to the beginning of the script. That is despite there always being an internal indicator — in preview mode Highland shows the page number, and in editing mode where you are typing. Those could be used for seamless switching. There is still some crashing going on, mainly when switching between preview and editing mode. The dialog auto-split now and then duplicates dialog — sometimes a short dialog line at the end of the page will get a (MORE) and then will be repeated at the beginning of the next page. A completely new weird bug with scene headings. Sometimes, scene headings get treated as charater names and the action paragraph after them as dialog. This seems to be happenning especially when (and despite) the heading being “forced” with a preceding “.” New bug — scene headings sometimes stay orphaned at the bottom of a page — defintely a problem! Highland is getting there, though. Keep up the good work! I am running the latest version of Highland (1.5.6) on 10.9 Mavericks. Without these bugs, Highland would easily be a 5-star App.

This is the best screenwriting app I’ve ever used. And the support from the developer is great, too.

Simple text-based script creation. Also great when used with Quote-Unquote’s iPhone app, Weekend Read. Could not be happier about this app. Tech support is also awesome. Highly recommended.

I’m new to Fountain and loving it so far, but I do miss being able to see my scripts formatted properly as I’m writing. I would like to leave other script-writing programs behind for good, but it’s a bit irritating to have to switch to preview mode in order to see a formatted version of the script. Hopefully a format-as-you-type mode is in store somewhere down the road.

Highland is a must-have app for any screenwriter who has embraced the Fountain plain text screenplay format. You can write and edit in it, but I personally use it as a utility to convert among various screenplay formats. In this regard, the app really shines. The ability to convert your old FDX files to Fountain is worth the price alone. But there’s more. Highland takes PDF scripts and *magically* converts them to the plain text Fountain file format. It’s pretty amazing.

If your text file has a colon in it, Highland breaks and wont show a preview. Do not buy, not production ready, no QC, buggy, a waste of money.

Highland has been an amazing resource for my writing. It’s replaced my dusty copy of Final Draft with a more accessible, minimal, cross-platform writing experience. I can type in any text editor, Google Doc, or iPhone notes app, or directly into Highland, and the app magically transforms it into a beautiful screenplay with no need to worry about margins or formatting. The syntax is simple and easy to learn, and the minimalist display keeps me focused on what’s important: my horrible 1st draft. In my opinion it’s the best screenwriting app out there!

I honestly, never knew how much time I was spending focusing on formatting and making pages look pretty, until I started writing in Highland. I’m a more efficient writer, focusing on what a writer should be focusing on: words. I’ve switched over to highland from final draft for my latest screenplay and I can honestly say that I will never go back. Highland is where I will write from now on. The highest compliment I can pay this program is that it gets out of my way. It makes me want to KEEP writing. Which is a writers dream.

You mentioned it in the blog. Would be a great feature for those of us writing fully in Highland.

I have had a load of amazing "Holy Crap!" surprises using Highland… melting the PDF… or simply converting Final Draft files just by a double click to open. Seriously, its a great buy. You will not be disappointed. Writing is already hard enough, at least let the program you use be simple.

No export, no preview, it barely imports text. Any time I try to format for screenplay: CRASH. Export: CRASH. RIP.

Just bought this app and had never used it before. Very well designed, easy to use. Great value for the price!