What the app formats for you

A screenplay has a fixed shape, and every professional screenwriting program keeps that shape for you. Sequence Thread does the same. This page is the list of things you will see happen on their own — so that when one of them does, you know it was meant to.

Why a script has rules at all

A screenplay is not just a story; it is a working document a crew uses to plan a shoot. The margins, the typeface and the way each kind of line is placed on the page are all fixed by long convention, and for one practical reason: one page of correctly formatted screenplay runs about one minute on screen. A producer reading a 110-page script knows they are looking at roughly a 110-minute film. That only works if everyone's pages look the same.

So the app does not offer fonts, margins or spacing. Those are decided. What it offers is a page that is already right, and a handful of things it takes care of as you type.

The things you will see happen on their own

• A name gets (CONT'D) after it when the same character speaks again after an interruption. You never type it; if you do, the app removes it and shows a small orange mark to say so. Why you never type (CONT'D) or (MORE).
• A speech that runs over the bottom of a page gets (MORE) under it and the name again, with (CONT'D), at the top of the next page. Same article.
• Pressing Enter after a character's name matches that name to someone in your cast, or asks you whether to create them. How a cue becomes a character.
• The same name printed twice in a row, with nothing but that character's own speech between, is pointed out as one speech written as two. One speech written as two.
• Blank lines and margin notes show on screen but never print. What prints and what doesn't.
• The page count is the runtime. The app counts pages the way a printed script would, and the project page turns that into minutes. Why a page is a minute.
• Once a script is issued to a crew, scene numbers stop moving and later changes go out as coloured pages. Locking a script.
• Spelling is checked on the Pages view, and you can teach it a word. Spelling, and teaching the app a word.

What the app does not decide

Everything that is writing. What a scene is about, how a line reads, where a scene begins and ends, whether a character is worth keeping — none of that is formatting, and the app never changes it on its own. The generating tools (drafting a scene, a critique pass) only run when you press a button that shows a credit cost, and every one of those gives you three seconds to change your mind.