Hmm, that’s actually unusual that you would get scene headings. I’d love to see a screenshot, to see if there are any hints.
First, we have a weird distinction in the app between screenplay and novel. This was always intended to be temporary, and we’d instead have separate columns, i.e. a screenplay version of the story, and a novel version of the same story. Or the same story in multiple languages etc. This turned out to be a technically difficult feature way back when, so we instead made modes, which you can only choose when the document is new, and you can’t change without our help, which is a crummy feature design for sure, but it was meant to be temporary.
Then authors started saying that they actually wanted scene headings even for novels, because even though you aren’t printing them in the novel, they’re a good handle for organizing events. So now the difference is even less.
The only other differences are some defaults, like margins and fonts.
Now, it looks like you’re actually in a screenwriting document, or you wouldn’t have scene headings at all. I don’t know if that’s intended, or a downstream effect of importing .fountain (I can’t remember if that forces you into a screenwriting document).
So I have a few questions:
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Is there a specific reason why you didn’t import a Word document? The Word importer has the option of configuring a “beat break sequence”, typically “***”, which you can put into the text ahead of time, and have it automatically broken into beats.
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How exactly is the text broken up in the .fountain file? I’m wondering if making scene headings convinced the app to assume they were intended, and force them to exist.
Technically, it’s not terribly difficult to hand-edit the file to tell the scene headings to go away. Scene headings are automatic, and they never show when identical scene headings are arranged to follow each other, unless a flag is specifically set to force a scene heading to exist when it otherwise wouldn’t have. That sounds like your situation.
So the shortest path right now might just be that I walk you through doing a search/replace directly on your .cau file, using for example Notepad++. This requires a bit of technical expertise, but if you do it on a copy, you could make it work.
But there are other reasons why scene headings can show. For example, the first scene in an episode will always have a scene heading, even if it’s identical to the previous scene heading. So a screenshot would help with understanding why it’s showing.
Lastly, if this is a newly imported document, consider importing as a novel instead.
Per