PDF_COMPATIBILITY.md

PDF preview and export compatibility

First Draft adds a local, read-only screenplay preview and non-destructive PDF export for standalone screenplays and ordered multi-file projects.

Supported in 0.12

• Scene headings, action, character cues, character extensions, parentheticals, dialogue, and transitions.
• US Letter and A4, using the page size selected under Settings → First Draft.
• Courier-style 12-point typography, screenplay margins, deterministic line wrapping, page breaks, and page numbers.
• Combined project output in the explicit order of the project note's parts property.
• Numbered filenames when an export already exists. First Draft never overwrites an existing PDF.

The source Fountain or Markdown files remain authoritative and unchanged. PDF generation happens entirely on the device; no screenplay text is uploaded.

Intentional boundary

The PDF is intended for comfortable reading and review. It is not locked production pagination and is not guaranteed to match Final Draft page for page.

This release does not yet format dual dialogue, lyrics, centred text, notes, sections, synopses, boneyards, revision colours, locked pages, or production tags.

Text safety

The plugin embeds unmodified Liberation Mono 2.1.5 regular and bold fonts locally. It includes representative extended Latin (such as Polish and Czech), Greek and Cyrillic support, including tested combining accents. Font bytes are bundled with the plugin and PDFs embed only the glyphs they use; no downloads or installed fonts are needed. The editor and preview font are unchanged.

PDF export stops when the embedded font cannot represent the text. It reports up to eight distinct unsupported characters with Unicode code points; no PDF is saved and the source remains unchanged. Genuine ? characters and supported accents still export normally. Preview remains available, and Fountain export preserves text for use in another application. This is not complete Unicode font support: emoji and unencoded characters remain unsupported, and right-to-left/complex-script layout is not guaranteed.

Chinese, Japanese and Korean PDFs

• Horizontal output for representative Simplified/Traditional Chinese, Japanese kana/kanji and Korean Hangul. Mixed Latin text is supported.
• Choose Settings → First Draft → PDF language to select regional Han character forms. The default is Simplified Chinese; select Japanese for a Japanese screenplay, Korean for Korean, or Traditional Chinese for Taiwan forms. This does not translate text; Hong Kong-specific forms are not included as a selectable mode. One PDF uses one selected language.
• CJK-containing PDFs use local Noto Sans CJK 2.004 regular/bold; Latin-only PDFs retain Liberation Mono. Noto is proportional for Latin letters. Both fonts are glyph-subsetted into each PDF, with no network requests. Install the optional offline CJK font pack once on each device using Install offline CJK PDF fonts. Latin fonts remain built into the plugin. Missing/incomplete/corrupt CJK packs stop export without saving a partial PDF.
• CJK wrapping uses measured font widths and Unicode line-break opportunities, with 14.4-point line spacing for readable 12-point CJK text (Latin-only output keeps its existing spacing), with grapheme-safe emergency wrapping for oversized words. Canonically equivalent decomposed Hangul is normalized only for drawing, never in source.
• Preview line breaks/page counts are approximate; review the exported PDF. Vertical typesetting, ruby, specialist typographic layout and universal Han coverage are not promised. Newer/rare ideographs and emoji can still stop export with the existing diagnostic. Forced character cues (@美咲) remain useful for names without uppercase/lowercase forms.
• The optional Noto assets total approximately 23.4 MB and are stored in six verified chunks no larger than 4 MB; the core bundle is approximately 2.35 MB. Standard release assets have an enforced 5 MB limit. Install auxiliary fonts separately per device rather than relying on plugin-file sync. Font decoding happens on CJK export, not on a Latin-only export. PDF subsets are much smaller than these assets. Physical iPhone/iPad memory and performance acceptance remains required.

npm run test:pdf-output generates eight multi-page review PDFs (all four languages in Letter/A4) and timings in ignored output/pdf/. Render them with Poppler for visual review. Reproducible font source details and licence are in assets/fonts/noto-cjk/README.md.

Title pages and continued dialogue

Explicit title metadata adds one unnumbered title page. Fountain supports a leading Title/Credit/Author/Source/Draft date/Contact block with indented multiline values. Markdown supports equivalent properties (draft-date for the date); use string values, quoting dates. A project's own note provides its metadata, and part title blocks never become body text or multiple cover pages. A filename alone does not generate a title page. No dates or personal details are inferred. Long fields wrap; metadata that cannot fit stops export rather than clipping. Missing glyphs in metadata also stop export before saving.

Character cues, parentheticals and dialogue are paginated as a speech. Short speeches move intact when they fit a fresh page. A speech that must span pages ends its outgoing page with (MORE) and repeats its cue with (CONT'D) on the next page, preserving extensions such as (V.O.). Parentheticals stay with their following dialogue. Oversized indivisible cues/parentheticals stop export. Generated markers never modify source or dialogue statistics. Preview uses the same layout rules, with approximate CJK metrics as described above.

Automatic same-speaker continuation across action, scene CONTINUED markers, dual dialogue and production pagination remain outside this release. The PDF review script also generates four title/continuation samples in Letter/A4, with Latin and mixed CJK text.

For interchange with Final Draft, see FDX compatibility.