September 28, 2026
Screenwriters think in pages. A page is roughly a minute of screen time, a scene "runs two and an eighth", and every writer knows the particular dread of a speech that spills onto the next page by a single line.
Until now, Plainchant only showed pages at the very end, when printing. While writing, the preview was one long, flowing column. That changes today.
Above the preview there is now a Page view switch. Turn it on, and the preview becomes a stack of real sheets of paper: page numbers in the corner, breaks exactly where they fall, (MORE) and (CONT'D) where a speech runs over, and the title page on its own sheet at the front.
The sheets shrink to fit whatever space the preview has: a little under three-quarters of their real size beside the editor on a laptop, and small enough to see a whole page at once on a phone. Turn the switch off and the flowing preview comes straight back. The app remembers which you prefer.
It would have been easy to make something that looks like pages. The trouble with "looks like" is that it drifts: a page view that breaks a few lines differently from the printed script is worse than none, because it teaches you the wrong page count.
So Page view does not have a layout of its own. It uses the very same page layout as printing, drawn by the very same code, on the same paper size you last printed on. The tests check that the two are identical, character for character.
Laying out a feature-length script takes a moment, and redrawing a hundred sheets of paper on every keystroke would make typing heavy again, after all the work that went into making it light.
So the pages wait until you pause, for about a third of a second, and then only the sheets that actually changed are redrawn. Typing a word on page forty leaves pages one to thirty-nine exactly as they were. Adding a blank line near the top, which moves nothing on the page, redraws nothing at all.
Every line on every sheet knows which line of your script it came from. That sounds like a small detail, but it is what makes the pages feel like part of the app rather than a picture of it:
With Page view, everything the print plan set out to do is built, apart from a direct PDF download, which printing to PDF made unnecessary. The tests now stand at 337 unit tests under Node, and 325 unit tests plus 694 checks of the app in a real browser.
Plainchant can save a script for Final Draft, but it cannot yet open one. Most writers who might switch already have scripts in Final Draft, so opening them is the likeliest next step. The same hands-on advice as ever applies too: the best test of Page view is a real script, in a real browser, on a real screen.