I tried using Xodo to convert the PDF to a text file. But then I lose all the formatting even the page breaks and it's turned into garbage that would take forever to reformat so it's pointless. So I'm in a quandary as to why dubscript won't open PDF files and off shows every single one of them I've got grayed out.
oops
Never mind I finally read the damn directions on the dubscript site that says it opens up Fountain text files and final draft FDX files and outputs in PDF. Now I've just got to find a converter from PDF to FDX that isn't Studiovicity which I hate. And it doesn't work either on importing PDF files.
Yes-- there are a few types…
Yes-- there are a few types of PDFs. If it's a text-based PDF, you might be able to just copy/paste the text and paste it into a text file and use that. You may need to fix a few artifacts, again, depending on the specific PDF, such as lines broken apart, which you'd need to reconnect, or perhaps use find/replace to remove long strings of spaces that might be captured when copy/pasting the text. It shouldn't take too long though to "clean up" the PDF text to regular Fountain format.If the PDF is graphics-based-- that is usually the result of using a scanner to scan a printed page (as opposed to outputting a PDF from another program), you might want to look at OCR software to convert to plain-text. You can use a traditional OCR software or an AI vision solution (see https://old.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1c4so8p/searching_for_the_… for some suggestions) to convert the image to plain text.Once you have a plain-text version of the PDF, it shouldn't be too hard to get it into shape for further editing. See the fountain.io site for examples of how things should look.
Good luck!