Quoted from LC Well, maybe someone can point out the excellent new features of 11 or 12 for us. Apart from fonts. I'd love to know without having to trawl through the tutorial. There's gotta be some, right?

The text to speech thing is quite good, although it still sounds a bit Stephen Hawkingish.

I think it had been there in earlier versions but never seemed to work properly for me.

I think you can download a free trial of 12 as well... runs for 60 days, so plenty of time to try out the features...

https://trial.finaldraft.com/

Quoted from AnthonyCawood I think you can download a free trial of 12 as well... runs for 60 days, so plenty of time to try out the features... https://trial.finaldraft.com/

Thanks for the heads up!

Quoted from Pleb The text to speech thing is quite good, although it still sounds a bit Stephen Hawkingish. I think it had been there in earlier versions but never seemed to work properly for me.

The trick is to install a bunch of different language packs on your Windows machine, each one comes with one or two voices that you can assign to characters within FD's text-to-speech.

No matter what the intended language is, they can all read English just fine (with an accent).

The problem I ran into was that FD only seemed to see the first ten voices added to the system. For a large-cast feature like Who Wants to Be a Princess? that turns out to be very inconvenient. That limit/bug may be fixed in 12.

Quoted from Pleb The text to speech thing is quite good, although it still sounds a bit Stephen Hawkingish. I think it had been there in earlier versions but never seemed to work properly for me.

Thanks, Max! I forgot to try the new version of this.
Thanks too for the hot tip, Frank.

I've taken the plunge and purchased an upgrade to 12 as it was on offer. I'm currently writing a Novella so I won't get to try it out just yet, but I'll see what it's like (probably for the May OWC) and provide some feedback.

Just to update - I used FD 12 to write a new draft of The Specimen from the April OWC.

The performance was shocking. I'm on a fairly new laptop using Windows 10 Pro and it would take several seconds between me typing and the characters appearing on the page.

I did a bit of research and found plenty of people with the same issue saying the outline function is what is causing the problem. So, I disabled the outline and voila, performance is back to normal. As the outline function is one of the new pieces of functionality, this is not a good start. Plus, I've had the whole thing hang on me even with the outline disabled so I wouldn't recommend getting this.

Quoted from MarkRenshaw Just to update - I used FD 12 to write a new draft of The Specimen from the April OWC. The performance was shocking. I'm on a fairly new laptop using Windows 10 Pro and it would take several seconds between me typing and the characters appearing on the page. I did a bit of research and found plenty of people with the same issue saying the outline function is what is causing the problem. So, I disabled the outline and voila, performance is back to normal. As the outline function is one of the new pieces of functionality, this is not a good start. Plus, I've had the whole thing hang on me even with the outline disabled so I wouldn't recommend getting this.

Thanks for the info, I will stick with trusty old version 9. If it ain't broke...

Quoted from MarkRenshaw Just to update - I used FD 12 to write a new draft of The Specimen from the April OWC. The performance was shocking. I'm on a fairly new laptop using Windows 10 Pro and it would take several seconds between me typing and the characters appearing on the page. I did a bit of research and found plenty of people with the same issue saying the outline function is what is causing the problem. So, I disabled the outline and voila, performance is back to normal. As the outline function is one of the new pieces of functionality, this is not a good start. Plus, I've had the whole thing hang on me even with the outline disabled so I wouldn't recommend getting this.

Well, that's disappointing. Thanks for sharing.

I am on FD 11 - seems good enough

Quoted from eldave1 I am on FD 11 - seems good enough

I'm on 10. Agree, it's good enough.

But, I'm really digging outlining and other pre-writing prep these days. I've been doing both on the FD beat sheet, just making hundreds of those little boxes. I would LOVE to have it more organized and still be all within the same program.

Doesn't sound like it's there, yet. Ugh.

I also write my treatments and one-pagers in FD. I would really like all of them to be somehow incorporated into one big FD project file. (Are you reading this FD? Call me.)

Quoted from PKCardinal I'm on 10. Agree, it's good enough. But, I'm really digging outlining and other pre-writing prep these days. I've been doing both on the FD beat sheet, just making hundreds of those little boxes. I would LOVE to have it more organized and still be all within the same program. Doesn't sound like it's there, yet. Ugh. I also write my treatments and one-pagers in FD. I would really like all of them to be somehow incorporated into one big FD project file. (Are you reading this FD? Call me.)

Good ideas

Quoted from PKCardinal I'm on 10. Agree, it's good enough. But, I'm really digging outlining and other pre-writing prep these days. I've been doing both on the FD beat sheet, just making hundreds of those little boxes. I would LOVE to have it more organized and still be all within the same program. Doesn't sound like it's there, yet. Ugh. I also write my treatments and one-pagers in FD. I would really like all of them to be somehow incorporated into one big FD project file. (Are you reading this FD? Call me.)

I’m also a fan of the beat sheet, great way to organize notes for a feature. Less useful for something you envision as a series.

The text-to-speech, especially if you have a bunch of voices installed on your machine, is fantastic.

Quoted from FrankM The text-to-speech, especially if you have a bunch of voices installed on your machine, is fantastic.

I'm on 11 and found the text-to-speech robotic and clunky, like the old robots in 60's sci-fi movies.  Is there somewhere you can download more human sounding voice patterns?

Quoted from Gary in Houston I'm on 11 and found the text-to-speech robotic and clunky, like the old robots in 60's sci-fi movies.  Is there somewhere you can download more human sounding voice patterns?

It's never going to sound like a dramatic reading, but that's because all you're really listening for would be awkward phrasings, word choice errors, and so on. Having a second option besides reading your words is very helpful.

The easiest way to get additional voices is to install additional languages, then enable their included voices. Better voices are available, but they're not free.

https://support.microsoft.com/.....f7-8e46-2b0fdf753130