I’ve been a user of Celtx for a number of years. Apart from being a great free app for writing screenplays, comics, stageplays, etc, I’ve also found it the closest thing on Windows to Scrivener for writing stories of any length.
That’s not to say it’s perfect, especially where text files are concerned. Some of the features available in screenplay mode just aren’t there, and some simple tools are missing (global word count across all of your files — I use a separate file per chapter — for instance).
So, I rolled up my sleeves and put together a little app. Originally I was going to do it as an extension, but after leafing though the docs for a while and making no progress I went back to good ol’ WinForms.
I haven’t done much testing but it seems to work OK on Vista 64-bit, Windows 7 32-bit and XP 32-bit.
Features
The app comes with three features:
- Global Word Count — this will extract all of the documents (text or screenplay at least) and perform a word count, then display the total.
- Export Selected Docs — this will display a list of the text documents (and screenplays) in your project and allow you to select which ones to convert to plain text, merge and save as a single file.
- Export to Final Draft — this is designed for screenplays and will export it to Final Draft 8’s .fdx XML format. It will only bring over the screenplay, not characters or notes or anything else, but it will preserve the formatting.
Installation
To use the application, just download the zip file below, extract all the files to the same folder and double-click the CeltxTools.exe file. No need to install.
The application uses the .Net framework and is best used with .Net Framework 3.5.
Usage
Once you have started the application:
- Click the Select File button to browse for your Celtx file.
- Once you have selected it, pick what task you would like to perform:
-
- Do a Global Word Count: this will display the total words of any text documents in the gap below the button.
- Export Selected Docs: this will display a pop-up window with a list of the text documents in your project, check those you want to export and it will merge them and export them to a text file and save it in the same directory as the original Celtx file, but with a .txt extension.
- Export to Final Draft: this will convert the screenplay part of your project to FD8’s format and save it in the same directory as the original Celtx file, but with a .fdx extension.
Release History
- 0.9 – 4/5/2010 – Initial release.
- 0.91 – 22/5/2010 – Added ability to do word count on selected files.
