Word Comic Book Script Template — Progress?

Maybe.

The past few days, between pages and panels, I’ve been investigating an area of Microsoft Word that I never completely understood: its outlining and numbering functions. It was reassuring to discover that the *reason* I never understood these functions is that they operate in a very odd and anti-intuitive manner. They’re easy enough to use for bulleted lists, conventional outlines, or legal numbering, but try to apply them to a comic book script with enumerated story pages, panels, and balloons — each with different paragraph types and numbering styles — and that seeming ease of operation instantly evaporates into esoterica.

Esoterica — but not impossibility.

I think I’m *beginning* to see how these functions could be made to work in a comic book writing template that, unlike my previous efforts, would be truly automated, renumbering panels and balloons on the fly, with no input necessary from the user.

Since “the user” of my templates has typically been *me*, and I’m an incredibly lazy person, this notion holds considerable appeal.

I’ll let you know how the investigation and subsequent programming, if any, progresses.

12 Responses to “Word Comic Book Script Template — Progress?”

  1. S Says:

    Word is like a stone tossed by a caveman at a deer: great if it was a rock and not a boomerang.

    What’s interesting, from an evolutionary perspective, is whether the deer is presupposed to being hit by flying objects, boulder-shaped or otherwise.

    Meanwhile, may I recommend WordPerfect?

    And in the meantime, proclaim, “Yo, Duck”?

  2. S Says:

    “predestined to being struck” – of course. Ah – its late.

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  5. Steve Gerber Says:

    Nothing against WordPerfect. It’s just that (a) I don’t own a copy and (b) I already have a working knowledge of VBA, Word’s programming language, and much of my coding for earlier versions of the template could be adapted to this more automated one.

    For what it’s worth, I’ve occasionally been tempted to experiment with OpenOffice, too. I like the idea of a comic book writing program being available for a free office suite.

  6. Dwight Williams Says:

    Been playing with Word(Windows and Mac), WordPerfect, OpenOffice, NeoOffice, Appleworks, and now Pages…and I’d say each of them has its strengths.

    Speaking of scripting freeware in general, you’ve heard of Celtx?

  7. Steve Gerber Says:

    No, I hadn’t heard of Celtx, but I just downloaded it. Looks like a very interesting idea, though probably not for my purposes.

  8. Dwight Williams Says:

    You never know.

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  10. Steve Gerber Says:

    I’ve downloaded the current versions of Celtx and OpenOffice, and I’ve, er, obtained a working test copy of the current WordPerfect, as well. I’m playing with all of them, as well as delving into Word’s outline numbering and experimenting with an add-on macro program called Shorthand that operates with any Windows-based program. (It’s the equivalent of the old Smartkey and Prokey programs for DOS.)

    Nothing concrete to report yet, but I am impressed with the look and feel of the new WordPerfect. Very solid, very stable.

  11. Harvey Poon Says:

    Have you thought about trying to do a template in Final Draft?

  12. Steve Gerber Says:

    I’m not a big fan of Final Draft.