Free Screenplay Format Checker

What does a screenplay format checker look for?

Scene headings get the most attention, because a broken one breaks everything downstream. A line like “int kitchen day” reads fine to you, but breakdown software, readers skimming for locations and our own parser all treat it as action. We flag lines that start like a heading but miss the INT. or EXT. period, headings typed in lower case, and headings with no time of day.

Character cues are next. If DR. SMITH speaks forty times and DR SMITH speaks twice, that is one person to you and two people to a scheduling program. We only flag spellings that collapse to the same name, so MIKE and MICHAEL are left alone, and extensions like (CONT’D), (V.O.) and (O.S.) are never counted as a different person.

For PDFs we also measure where each cue sits on the page. A cue that drifts a few characters off the column your other cues use usually means a stray tab, and it is the kind of thing that makes a page look home made.

What is the difference between a fix, a check and a style note?

Fix means a reader or a program will misread the line. Check means it looks off and is worth a glance. Style notes cover habits like action blocks that run past four lines, which most readers skim. Plenty of produced scripts break the style notes on purpose. Break them on purpose too, not by accident.

Clean, professionally formatted scripts usually come back with no Fix items at all. If yours shows dozens of the same issue, it is almost always one setting in your writing app, not dozens of separate mistakes.

What are the most common screenplay format mistakes?

The ones readers notice first are not exotic. A character called SAM on page 3 and SAMMY on page 40. Scene headings with no INT. or EXT. Action paragraphs that run for ten lines. Camera directions such as WE SEE and ANGLE ON scattered through a spec script. Transitions like CUT TO after every scene, when a new scene heading already implies the cut.

Each of these is small, but together they tell a reader the writer has not read many professional scripts. The checker flags the mechanical ones and lists the style ones as notes, so you can decide which to keep.

What font, page size and length should a screenplay use?

Courier or a Courier style font at 12 point is the standard, because the whole page per minute convention depends on a fixed width font. Scripts in the US use US Letter paper; much of the rest of the world uses A4, and most readers will accept either if the margins are right.

Number every page except the first, in the top right corner. Do not number scenes in a spec script; scene numbers are added later, when a script becomes a shooting script.

Do you need screenwriting software to format a script?

No. Dedicated software saves time, but a script written in a word processor or in Fountain, a plain text format, can be formatted correctly and exported to PDF. What matters is the PDF a reader receives.

Whatever you write in, run the finished PDF through a checker before you send it. Exports from word processors are where indents drift and page breaks split a character name from its dialogue.