The new Board panel presents itself as a bridge between plotting and writing: We have turned the Board into a Swiss army knife from which you can pull out a wide variety of functions: an all-purpose weapon in the story development process with cards that can be short & catchy just as well as long & detailed, that can display icons, storylines, summaries or the entire texts, and that can arrange themselves in a flexible grid or line display.

In the Board, the possibilities and advantages of the Overview and Text panel are now combined, which allows a seamless transition between the individual development stages of the story.

This way, the Board can “grow” bit by bit, also in the size of the cards: In the beginning, you might only write one-line keywords, and the further you develop the individual scenes, the more extensive and detailed the content and information on the cards will become.

Here’s a tip: If you set the Board to ‘Text’, the texts you enter in the Board cards will be transferred directly into the plot or treatment text. :) This means that if the option ‘Card contents: Text’ is selected, the contents of the Board and the Text panel are mirrored, and if you edit the texts, the changes are applied to the other panel in each case.
If, on the other hand, you set ‘Summary’, the contents of the Board and the Overview panel are mirrored, or all changes are applied reciprocally.

The new features and improvements in detail:

• In addition to the grid arrangement, the cards in the Board can now also be displayed in line mode. The number of lines per card is freely selectable (gear menu option ‘Lines of text per card’).
• Also new is the possibility to display and edit the actual text (and not only the summaries) in the cards (gear menu option ‘Card contents’ -> ‘Text’). Accordingly, more card sizes are now offered with a larger maximum size.
• The Board panel has a new context menu with comprehensive options (right mouse button click on card). Some options also allow multiple selection, so you can delete, move into archive, cut, copy and paste all selected elements at once.
• The cards can now also show the tags as well as the assignment of the steps or scenes to several storylines. (Previously, only the complete coloring of the cards in the color of one storyline was possible.) The storylines are displayed as color circles at the top right of each card, the tags to the left.
• The Board can now be configured separately from the Overview panel (via its own gear menu). This affects the options ‘Numbering’, ‘Card contents’, ‘Summaries’ and ‘Tags’ (including submenus).
• It is now possible to work with multiple Board panels that are configured differently. For example, two boards can be set up side by side, displaying different levels and/or card contents.
• In the Texts panel, the keyboard shortcuts Alt+↑ and Alt+↓ can be used to jump to the previous or next elements.
• If one customizes the structure, now also the colorings are also taken over.
• In the ‘Story Arc’ section of the Storylines panel, the drop-down options of the turning-points are now more clearly named: ‘Turn to the positive / negative’ (instead of just ‘Positive’ or ‘Negative’). In addition, the description fields now visually subordinate themselves better to the turning-points to which they refer.

IMPORTANT INFORMATION FOR ALL WINDOWS-USERS: DELETE OLD DRAMAQUEEN INSTALLATION

DramaQueen is now a 64-bit program. The previous version is therefore not getting automatically overwritten (like in all earlier updates). To prevent the old version from opening, please proceed as follows:
– In Windows Explorer, click on the “C:” drive, look in “Programs (x86)” and find the “DramaQueen” folder. (Check for safety that there are no project files (filename.dq) of yours in there).
– Now delete the whole “DramaQueen” folder. Done :)
(In case you had a link to DramaQueen (e.g. on the desktop or the taskbar), you have to re-create it. You can start DramaQueen from the “Program Files” folder and chose the “Pin to taskbar” option from the right-click menu.)

DramaQueen 3.2 comes up with small but very smart new options around PDF export and new fields in the Character and Locations panels.

Smart PDF-Export

The new dialog appears after selecting the text level and PDF file name:

With the ‘Page selection’ option you can enter the desired pages – separated by commas, spaces or hyphen. It is also possible to combine the specification of individual pages and a specific page range (e.g. “2, 4, 6-9”).

With the option ‘Pages with changes’, exactly those pages are selected which are showing recorded text changes (via the option ‘Track text changes’):

This for example allows exporting only the revised pages as a PDF and print them out. In a screenplay these are the the blue, yellow etc. exchange pages.

With the option ‘Specific elements’ you can select individual steps, scenes, episodes, ideas, character or location descriptions (multiple selection possible). This is possible because in DramaQueen the whole text is divided into individual text modules, e.g. scenes, characters… and is structured hierarchically. The page numbers of the selected elements are then automatically displayed:

It is also possible to select the desired page(s) directly by clicking the corresponding page in the new preview.

Very handy is also that you can combine all options. How?
For example, you first select the ‘Pages with changes’ option and if you then change the drop-down to ‘Page selection’, the changed pages will still be displayed, so that you can add certain other pages.

New fields in the Characters and Locations panels

It is important to us not to overload DramaQueen and therefore we take care not to offer unnecessarily small or duplicating options in the character and location panel.

Now, however, we have added four meaningful categories to the two panels: For locations there are the new fields ‘Feel’ and ‘Position and for the characters ‘Secret’ and ‘Temperament’.

If you like to learn why, for example, a secret can be a great dramatic tool in your character development just have a look at our DramaWiki.

All improvements can be found as always in our update report.

The world is in lockdown, everything “abandonable” is shut or closed down. Accept this invitation and make the lockdown your “writedown,” so now, in the weeks of the lockdown, write down your story.

Help you do this with the new feature in DramaQueen 3.1: ‘Output, Target, Progress’:

The new DQ Output & Progress Tracker now allows you to set writing goals and keep track of how fast you are progressing step by step. It shows you how much you’ve accomplished, whether you’re still on schedule, how much space you have left to finish the current chapter or story, or when your writing time is up.

Where can you find the new feature?

– In the new release 3.1 for the versions PLUS and PRO (the update is offered automatically and for free after opening DramaQueen)
– In the gear menu of the text view under ‘Output, target, progress’, whereupon another gear menu appears at the bottom of the status bar:

Here you can set which output should be displayed.

Depending on which output option you have selected, you can define the target, i.e. how many characters/words per scene, day, week, month or session you want to achieve. You can also define a negative target, for example if you are in the process of shortening.

The current progress is also displayed in the status bar – as a percentage and as a bar. If you are approaching your self-defined target, the progress bar turns green:

For example, a 90-minute script has about 100,000 characters. So if you set a daily output of 5000 characters and you create this output every day, you will have a first script version ready after 20 working days. you will have a first draft of your script ready :)

If you exceed your writing goal, the progress bar can even show you by how many percent you are “over”. There are 2 possibilities:

If you set an output goal and even managed to write more text than you set out to, the “over-achievement” is positive. Therefore, the progress bar remains green in this case:

The situation is different if your text is not allowed to exceed a certain length – for example, because your screenplay cannot meet the specified film length or because the publisher has planned a certain length for your short story in an anthology.
So if the length of the text is given and therefore exceeding it is negative, the bar will first turn orange and then red the more you exceed the length requirement:

If you keep the status bar displayed, you can follow your progress continuously. Of course, you can also hide the status bar and only show it selectively to see where you currently stand in terms of your output and progress.

By the way, you can define your own workload for each output. So you can set several workloads in parallel. And of course you can always change which output or progress you want to see.

The 3.1 update with the new feature is offered to all test users as well as to all users of version 3 automatically upon opening.

3 new test days

For those interested, we have unlocked 3 additional test days where you can try out the DQ output and progress tracker. When opened, DramaQueen automatically switches to the test version 3.1, which already supports macOS Big Sur (11.0).

We wish you to get out of 2020 and into 2021 well, health-wise, mentally, professionally and financially. Hopefully, the new year is under a better star. But before that, we wish you a wonderful and positively reflective and maybe even especially creative and positive Christmas!

All the love,
Your DramaQueen Team

Like squirrels collecting hazelnuts, we collect new and crispy features almost monthly. In the new version 2.8 DramaQueen adds support for footnotes! But not only that: If you order DramaQueen PLUS or PRO from now on, you get the license for version 3, that means for the serial extension and all upcoming updates up to and including 3.9! :)