DramaQueen 4.6 – Update Report

This update contains new features, improvements and bug fixes.

NEW FEATURES

• Automatic backup system: Open documents are now regularly saved to a separate backup folder per default. When quitting DramaQueen, documents with unsaved changes are automatically backed up. A new ‘Backup’ tab in the Program settings allows you to configure the backup interval (1–30 minutes), the maximum number of backups, and to disable/enable automatic backups. The option to open the backup folder is available in the ‘File’ menu as well as in the backup settings.
• New text element: Dual Dialog (Movie/TV documents): Dual Dialog allows displaying simultaneous dialogues of two characters in two parallel columns. It consists of the styles Character, Stage Direction, and Dialogue, each having a tab stop position for the left and one for the right dialogue per line. The formatting popup opens on the first ENTER/TAB with the appropriate options. After entering the first character name, ENTER or TAB jumps to the right column for the second character name, then to the next line, etc. SmartType character name completion works in both columns. The opening parenthesis for dual dialogue stage directions is set automatically. Font attributes (font, bold, italic, colors, line spacing, tracking) are automatically inherited from their regular counterparts (Speaking Character, Stage Direction, Dialogue).
• Per-character layout and highlighting: The Layout dialog now features a new character dropdown for ‘Speaking Character’ (Movie/TV) and ‘Character + Text’ (Audio/Stage). When a single character is selected, text color, background color, font, bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, font size, line spacing and tracking can be set individually for that character, to highlight the dialogs for each speaking character differently. In screenplays and dialog books, the characters’ names are highlighted. In audio plays and stage plays, highlighting affects the entire paragraph (character name + spoken text). Orphaned per-character settings (deleted/renamed characters) are cleaned up automatically.
• New display options in the gear menu of the text panel – for PLUS & PRO: ‘Show structure elements’, ‘Show summaries’, ‘Show locations’, ‘Show characters’ and ‘Show turning points’. Character names and locations appear in parentheses and are displayed in all caps. ‘Turning points’ are displayed in the color of their storyline. All new display options are also applied during export and printing (WYSIWYG).
• In the Novel view (book documents), the extended option ‘Show summaries as (chapter) headings’ is available in the gear menu. The headings are displayed in bold by default and separated from the summary by a colon. In addition, the (chapter) headings can be styled in the Layout settings, ‘Text’ tab, ‘Text element’ section.
• Watermarks – for PLUS & PRO: All texts can be marked with a watermark during PDF export as well as Final Draft export. The watermark text can be freely entered and the diagonal direction of the watermark (top to bottom or bottom to top) can be configured. The watermark is recognized during Final Draft import.
• Autocorrection: In the Program settings, ‘Autocorrection’ tab, the section ‘Correct while typing’ now allows you to configure whether spaces around punctuation are automatically corrected, redundant spaces are removed when deleting/cutting, and the second capital letter at the beginning of a word is corrected after completing the word. In the section ‘Replace while typing’, in addition to the existing replacements, the symbols ©, ® and ™ are now also supported.
• The spell checker now supports language variants for German and English. After activating the corresponding language variants during installation, you can distinguish between German (Germany), German (Austria) and German (Switzerland) as well as between English (US), English (UK) and other variants (Australian, Canadian, South African, New Zealand).
• The layout option ‘Configure odd/even pages separately’ for page margins is now available in the Layout settings, ‘Page’ tab, ‘Page margins’ section.
• In the ‘Extra’ tab of the Layout settings, a separator between all steps or scenes can now be defined.
• Hyperlinks are now also detected and highlighted in the main texts (Plot, Outline, Script/Novel), in text annotations and in footnotes, and can be opened in the external browser by clicking on them.
• Episode title pages: For series projects, title pages can now be automatically inserted before each episode. The title pages contain the episode label, number, episode title and the writers. The feature can be shown or hidden via the gear menu in the Text panel (checkmark option ‘Show’). The option ‘Regenerate’ recreates the title pages with updated data when needed. The episode title is displayed in uppercase by default but can be manually reformatted. When an episode title page is edited and then left, a dialog appears asking whether to apply the changes to all episode title pages or only to the current one. Episode title pages also appear during export (PDF, Word, EPUB).
• The File menu now offers the new import options ‘Texts’ and ‘Layout settings’ (option ‘Import → Into current document’): A complete text level can now be imported from another dq document, and the insertion position is selectable.
• Control character display: The gear menu of the Text panel now offers the option ‘Show all non-printable characters (control characters)’. It toggles the display of paragraph marks, line breaks and tabs across all text levels (Plot, Outline, Script).
• The text notes area now features a context menu as well as a gear menu with options to hide the display of the timestamp or the authors.
• Entire DramaQueen document as AI chat context: The new option ‘Entire dq document’ in the AI context menu allows you to pass all texts, panels, and elements (ideas, storylines, characters, locations, world elements, and other chats) to the AI chat as a single attachment with one click. This is especially helpful for quickly getting an overview of all the detail information you need in large projects such as sagas or series. If the context exceeds 100 KB in size, a dialog warns to help keep AI costs in check.
• Images in AI chat: Images (PNG, JPEG, PDF, GIF, BMP, WebP) can now be attached as context files to the AI chat. The AI can see the images and respond to their content, e.g. recognize elements in a screenshot and make suggestions.
• Drag & drop for file attachments in AI chat: Files can now be attached as AI context by dragging them from the file system directly into the input field.
• AI chats can now also be exported as PDF via the export option in the context menu.

IMPROVEMENTS

• Separate formatting for speaking characters: In audio and stage scripts, a separate AllCaps control for character names in ‘Character + Text’ is available (default: uppercase). In screenplay scripts, capitalization for ‘Speaking Character’ can likewise be toggled via the Layout settings. The text element selection in the Layout dialog is now remembered for 10 minutes after closing the dialog.
• Audio and stage documents: For overlong character names, the start of dialog now jumps to the next 12.5 mm grid instead of far to the right. The SmartType character name popup for ‘Character + Text’ is now reliably triggered immediately when activating the text element. Formatting options as icons in the toolbar are now also available for audio and stage documents.
• SmartType popup: The SmartType popup now uses the capitalization from the character or location list instead of always displaying names in uppercase. When ‘All Caps’ is enabled in the Layout settings, uppercase is maintained.
• When using the AI functions, the latest models from OpenAI (GPT-5.4) and Anthropic (Claude Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6) are now available. They can be selected from the ‘Select AI Model’ menu.
• Import/Export: In the AI Chat panel, the context menu option ‘Export chat‘ has been replaced with a submenu that offers the formats PDF, Word, Rich Text, TXT, Markdown, and HTML for direct selection.
• The system theme now works correctly for all dark mode elements. The selection in the Overview and Board panels is now more visible in dark mode.
• The ‘Change display & revisions’ dialog has been completely revised: The ‘Options’ tab now offers separate sections for ‘Which changes to mark’ (all revisions or only the active one) and ‘How to highlight’. In addition to the existing highlighting options (text color, margin marks), background color, underline, bold and italic are now also available. Text color and background color can be enabled individually, and the color source is selectable: colors can be based on authors or revisions. The dialog is now also accessible via a new menu entry in the Edit menu.
• The Story arcs panel can now display the individual labels of the structure elements and features a gear menu with configuration options.
• The ‘Colorize’ option is now also available in the toolbar of the Overview and Board panels, as well as in the Board’s gear menu.
• The font size of all panels can be adjusted using Ctrl+mouse wheel (Windows) or Cmd+mouse wheel (Mac) – for quick, flexible zooming.
• The text note icon in the Text panel now adapts to the zoom level of the text – it grows and shrinks with the text.
• Mouse-over for text note and footnote contents: A tooltip displays the content of the respective note or footnote.
• Merging elements in the Text panel using the Backspace key now also works without numbering.
• The search field in the toolbar is now automatically cleared when switching panels and now also works in the Board panel.
• The full name of the character is now used for character lists, profiles and descriptions.
• Scene headings in the summaries column of the Overview panel are now capitalized – for MOVIE/TV and AUDIO documents.
• In the Storytelling panel, the buttons ‘Expand all paragraphs’ and ‘Collapse all paragraphs’ are now also available in the panel header.
• Full screen mode for the Story arcs panel and the Storytelling panel: Both panels can now be displayed in full screen mode.
• Full screen mode can now also be exited using the ESC key.
• The keyboard shortcuts for paragraph styles can now also be triggered via the numeric keypad.
• The option ‘Lock / unlock number’ is now also available with multiple selection.
• The option ‘Number dialogs’ for scripts is now also available in the Layout settings, ‘Numbering’ tab.
• The option ‘Usage and display of storylines’ is now also available in the storyline assignment menus.
• Settings changes are now included in immediate undo.
• After deleting an element from the list in the respective panel, the next element is automatically selected.
• The display mode of references (grid or list) is now remembered.
• A new main window now always opens in the same text level as the current main window (see View menu, option ‘Open additional main window’).
• In the ‘Export as’ dialog (File menu), the text level dropdown now defaults to the currently active text level.
• In the text element dropdown of the Layout Settings dialog, the text element is now pre-selected based on the current cursor position in the text panel.
• The respective options under ‘Export texts’ / ‘Generate texts’ are now also offered when the text level is disabled.
• When adding an element via the add menu, the corresponding panel opens automatically if it is not already open.
• Import/Export: In the AI Chat panel, the context menu option ‘Export chat‘ has been replaced with a submenu that offers the formats PDF, Word, Rich Text, TXT, Markdown, and HTML for direct selection.

BUG FIXES

• The configured summaries option is now correctly remembered again.
• The summaries option ‘Apply scene headings’ in the Board panel now works correctly.
• The character/word counter now counts correctly when switching between scenes via the option ‘Show only active scene’ in the Text panel. Previously, switching scenes caused incorrect additions or subtractions in the daily word count. Additionally, the daily word count is now correctly preserved after restarting DramaQueen.
• Dusk/dawn scenes are now correctly displayed again in the Statistics ‘Total’ (‘Extras’ menu).
• In the Storytelling panel, the dropdown for selecting the gender of the ‘Main character of the storyline’ option was blocked. This issue has been resolved.
• In the Annotations panel, the options of the ‘Add references’ menu are now enabled when ‘Annotations for all elements’ is selected in the gear menu.
• A bug with multiple selection in combination with drag & drop and number locking has been fixed.
• In the footnotes feature, the following bugs have been fixed: The footnote number was overlapping the text because the width of the number area was calculated incorrectly (the negative hanging indent was erroneously included). When opening a saved document, footnotes were read without the correct paragraph style, causing the bullet, indent and font size to be missing. The text background color in the footnote editing area did not match the area background color.
• On Macs with Retina displays and limited RAM (e.g. 8 GB), DramaQueen could crash or display a blank screen in fullscreen mode because the image buffer for text rendering became too large. The buffer size is now capped, so fullscreen mode renders at slightly reduced resolution if necessary.
• The ‘Copy title page?’ dialog has been revised: A ‘No’ option as well as OK and Cancel buttons have been added.
• A bug in the order of annotations that could occur under macOS 26 Tahoe has been fixed.
• Clicking in the text at a line break position could cause an error message.
• In Track Changes mode, a deleted scene could be inserted at the beginning of the document instead of its original position when reverting the structural change. This happened when the stored predecessor references could no longer be resolved (e.g. when multiple elements were deleted simultaneously).
• No AI summary will be displayed if the scene contains no text content.
• The automatic AI summary generation kept retrying after an API error (e.g. insufficient quota at the AI provider) on every scene change. Automatic retries are now suppressed for 10 minutes after an API failure. Explicit actions via the context menu or gear menu continue to work immediately.
• When AI chat compaction fails due to high context usage (e.g. with large image attachments), an error message is now displayed, recommending to start a new chat.
• When exporting (PDF, Word, RTF) Stage documents at script level, the scene heading was displayed twice. The export incorrectly generated an automatic heading prefix even though the manual scene heading already contained this text. The Text panel displayed the heading correctly.
• Track Changes: The setting ‘By revision color’ is now retained after saving and reloading the document (previously it was reset to ‘By author color’). Changes to the highlighting options ‘Underline’, ‘Bold’ and ‘Italic’ are now immediately visible in the text editor.
• Scene headings (summaries) in book documents: The option ‘Line break before summary’ was shifting the summary into the left margin. This bug has been fixed.
• Text element ‘Character + Text’ in audio and stage documents: Underline, strikethrough and background color no longer extend across the tab space.
• The ‘Configure header’ and ‘Configure footer’ dialogs displayed rendering artifacts when opened. The toolbar additionally offers the AllCaps font attribute. Total page count now shows the current page count of the document.