Highlight Characters

The Highlight Characters tool offers a way for you to color code your characters making table reads and character tracking a breeze.

Final Draft is the industry standard screenwriting software used by over 95% of film and television productions in North America.

0:00:12
Today our focus is on the Highlight Characters tool. Highlighting characters is a useful tool that allows you to color code individual characters and their dialogue.

0:00:25
It can be applied in a number of scenarios; use the Highlight Characters tool to skim a script and easily see where characters have dialogue.

0:00:34
To use the Highlight Characters tool go to Format, Highlight Characters and the Highlight Characters dialogue box will appear. Choose the characters you wish to color code. For this video we'll use Trish and Zed and assign them each a color by clicking on
the color selector arrow. Click OK to apply your color selections. Now when you scroll through the script you can easily see where these characters interact and read just their dialogue.

0:01:04
Use the Highlight Characters tool to simplify scheduling and prepping for table reads and performances. Have an actor reading
multiple parts? Highlight all of his or her characters with the same color when highlighting a character or characters the colors will be displayed on-screen and when a PDF of a script is created.

If color printing is available and "text in color" is enabled in the print window the character highlighting will be printed exactly as it is on-screen.

0:01:39
You can also customize your highlight character colors to accommodate more characters. To turn off highlighting simply return to the Highlight Characters dialogue box and change the color back to none.

[WhiteSandBeachGirl]

HIGHLIGHT CHARACTER BOX IS EMPTY. I manage VO recording for animation and I use the Highlight Character function ALL the time. When we record a character, I will break out the character's sequences/scenes into individual files per sequence/scene. To do this, I copy that particular segment from the master script and create the file. HOWEVER, sometimes (not all) when I do this, the highlights disappear and when I access the Highlight Character function, the box is devoid of all character names. I have not been able to add them back in. Thus, the characters in my new file cannot be highlighted, unless I manually highlight each one. What gives? Am I doing something wrong, or is it a Final Draft flaw?

[TheGiulioSeverini]

Do you have an option to remove ALL characters colors in one click?

[joezagorski]

How do I create a list of characters on Final Draft 11?

[dennisc.]

Do you have someone reading stage directions for your table read? Of course you do! Can you automatically highlight stage directions in Final Draft 11? Of couse not! At least, I can't figure out how to do it. If I'm wrong, and you can automatically highligh stage - like you can highlight characters - PLEASE let me know I don't want to have to highlght every stage direction in my 100 page script. Thanks.