Does anyone know anything about Windows? Every time I try to learn, it seems that I lose all sense of sanity and logic. It’s an operating system that reminds me of the following dull anecdote from my community theatre days:
A couple of techies attempted to build a doorframe. The end result resembled something out of a German expressionist film. You guys know what a doorframe looks like, right? It’s pretty much a rectangle, all right angles and straightness. This was a sort of indescribable rhomboid disaster that did not, in any way, resemble a frame on which one hangs a door.
The director, stage manager, and master carpenter did the sort of simultaneous double-take generally found in a teen sex-comedy after a super-hot chick walks by in a wet bikini. Only it wasn’t the thrill of arousal they felt. It was the confusion and mild amusement of something that could only be created by someone making minimum wage at a part-time job.
Instead of trying to explain how, exactly, they fucked this up or why they felt they could present this doorframe instead of just pulling the nails out and starting over, the two techies attempted to sell the director on this particular doorframe. Because, you see, the play was a comedy, and comedies are always wacky and full of odd set designs and strange artistic flourishes, right? Right? Right?!! It would’ve been all well and good except for the part where, in order to fit with the doorframe, a custom door with no right angles would have had to be fabricated, which cost money and time and made no fucking sense. Also, it probably wouldn’t have opened or closed properly.
For those not clever enough to comprehend this analogy, Microsoft are the techies, and Windows is that fucking doorframe. Common sense doesn’t apply, and in order to wrangle that operating system into something remotely usable, one has to fabricate an insane door for it.
Here’s what I’ve managed so far: after many long months trying to figure it out, I finally (quite by accident, to my great annoyance) found a way to make Final Draft — that’s right, the screenwriting program — modular. I don’t even know if I’m using the correct vernacular, but here’s one of the basic problems with Windows: the setup programs shit files in the most inconceivable places, and every goddamn program gets so entwined with the fucking registry, you cannot do a simple task like, say, copy an .exe file to a USB drive and use it on a different computer.
For those Windows evangelists (all five of you) scoffing that you can’t do that on a Mac, either, get ready for my rebuttal: YES, YOU FUCKING CAN, YOU GODDAMN RETARDS. Because the shit’s modular. Maybe you couldn’t have in the pre-OSX days, but a new era dawned, oh, eight or nine years ago.
Anyway, I finally found a utility that tracked every goddamn file Final Draft installed and figured out a way to shove them all into a few folders, put them on my thumb drive, and — voilà — a mostly functional, modular version of Final Draft. It has two drawbacks:
The first drawback means little to me. This little project consumed me for one reason: I want to fuck off at my shitty day job, because why wouldn’t I? At work, I don’t have the required administrative privileges to install programs, so I had to come up with a workaround. Mission accomplished, and I can leave it authorized until I can leave that dump for greener pastures. (Hopefully January!)
It’s the second drawback that bugs me. See, Final Draft installs a font called Courier Final Draft, obviously a variant on the well-known Courier font. This is fine and awesome; I wouldn’t even mind using Courier itself, but why not use Courier Final Draft, the one designed to use with the program?
What I object to is Courier New, which you’ll be shocked to learn was developed by Microsoft. It doesn’t take some semi-insane, obsessive-compulsive font nerd to realize that Courier New is not only fucking ugly as sin, it also does major hoodoo to the line spacing. As a random for-instance, I just changed the font in a script that just went out. It’s 119 pages with Courier Final Draft; with Courier New, it’s 137 pages, and it’s solely because there’s weird, unnecessary vertical spacing. (Even adjusting Final Draft’s line-spacing options still puts it at 124 pages.)
I wouldn’t call myself a page counter, per se. I don’t follow the script-guru “Moment X must occur on Page Y” philosophy, but certain things should occur within certain basic ranges of time in the story, and I do subscribe to the “1 page = 1 minute” philosophy. So if you have an inaccurate representation there, it throws the whole thing off.
So, for instance, when I spent the past few days plowing through the first draft of one of the many script ideas I took the time to step-outline while trying to figure out how to get Final Draft to work without installing it*, I was hovering around 40 pages before reaching my outline’s predetermined act break point. Yet I didn’t say to myself, “This is kind of a long first act.” Instead, I said, “I don’t feel like I’ve written enough for this to be 40 pages. Something must be wrong with Courier New.”
And boy was it ever. I always knew Courier New looked different (read: ugly), and college taught me that it’s the go-to font for padding term paper page length requirements. (Of course, midway through my college experience, profs wised up and either barred the use of any Courier-based font or went from page requirements to word requirements — foiled again!) Still, I never paid much attention to just how much it fucks with the page count until I got home, changed the font to Courier Final Draft, and found myself back on good old page 32, which felt just about right for what I’d written.
So that’s fucking annoying. On one level, I could say, “This is freeing — without having to pay attention to inaccurate page counts, I can just write without putting any artificial barriers on when things need to happen.” Which is awesome, except for the part where I like artificial barriers. My desire to write screenplays isn’t an accident or act of opportunism: the blank page frightens me. Constraints, artificial or otherwise, make me feel much more comfortable. To me, it seems weird and a little stupid to go to all the trouble to learn new page approximations to get into the Courier New habit. And why the fuck should I have to?
This all goes back to my lack of administrative privileges. If I don’t have those privileges, I can’t install new fonts; if I can’t install new fonts, I can’t install standard Courier, much less Courier Final Draft (were I to hack the planet, I’d go with the one that’s less obviously tied to a non-work-related program).
I tried looking up little workarounds; for instance, one of the ways I get Final Draft to work is by sticking all those .dll files that get shoved into the C:\WINDOWS\system32\ directory into the folder with the Final Draft .exe, which is one of those little Windows tricks I’ve picked up over years of struggling to make it a useful operating system. I had hoped something similar would exist for fonts, but no. The closest I found was some convoluted instructions that are only good for one session.
Today, I stumbled across a small app that allegedly registers fonts in Windows even if a person lacks administrative privileges. I have no idea if it’ll work (I’ll keep you posted).
It still makes me wonder why Windows has to be so fucking stupid about everything. Why can’t it just do shit without having to apply a bunch of crazy hacks and exploits? Oh right, because of all the horribly flawed security issues that make those hacks and exploits a reality. Holy fucking Christ do I hate Microsoft.
Update 12/11/09: I still hate Microsoft, but the “RegisterFonts” utility actually worked…sort of. It does indeed register my off-books fonts, but Final Draft is a little quirky about recognizing them — you have to go into the “Elements” controls, change the font in one of the elements, and click the “apply to all” button in order for it to display in anything but Courier New (I assume this is because it’s the next “authorized” font on the list, but who the fuck knows with Windows).
*For those of you saying, “Gee, Stan, why not just set up an MS Word screenplay template?” I have to respond: the toilet bowl I work for is so goddamn cheap, they won’t pony up for MS Word alone, much less the MS Office suite. Instead, we’re forced to use OpenOffice, a Java-based dungheap that costs nothing except an unfortunate tax on shitty-computer resources. OpenOffice alleges to support MS Office templates, but its support is shoddy at best, yet as far as I can tell it doesn’t have its own native templating system. It’s also surreally counterintuitive when it comes to basic tasks like setting up margins and indentation points, so the whole “set up a template” idea is a bit of a non-starter.
“But, hey,” you say, with a sudden stroke of inspiration, “you could always just write a text file without any tabs and then paste it into Final Draft and set up the correct formatting, right?” First off, get off my back, all right?! Secondly, I fully admit that this is my issue more than that of crappy software, but I just can’t write like that. I can outline until the cows come home, or write awful fiction or boring blog posts or whatever in a blank text file. When it comes to screenplays, I just can’t tolerate anything but Final Draft. I admit I’m spoiled, but I also paid my hard-earned money for it, so blow me. [Back]
Posted by Stan on December 10, 2009 4:25 PM