Newbie (without a clue): Final Draft to Fountain

[shauxesis]

Hi everyone,

I'm a little out of my depth here, and would really appreciate any help/ advice or your thoughts. I'm a competent windows user who has just popped my macbook cherry and loving it! I am a writer (screenplays) by trade and so have a years upon years of Final Draft and Movie Magic files kicking about which I want to convert into the friendlier Fountain format. I can do this easily by opening each document in Highland and saving in the Fountain format. But I have over 500 docs, and just the thought of manually converting them is enough to make me want to give up. So any help to batch this process using Hazel would be greatly appreciated!

Programs used:

Final Draft 9 (.fdx or .fdr)
Movie Magic (.mmsw)

This is what I want to batch automate:

Select Final Draft or Movie Magic docs in folder called Final Draft Screenplays, and Movie Magic Screenplays

Open these Final Draft or Movie Magic docs in Highland app (which automatically converts docs to Fountain upon import).

Then have Highland save converted Fountain doc into a specified folder in documents, called Fountain Screenplays.

Also (but only if it is possible), I would like to maintain the original date/time stamp of the converted document for archiving purposes.

Seems like a similar process to converting Pages docs to pdf, but I just don't have the know-how to do it.

Thank you in advance for your time in answering this post.

xS

[jedibugs]

This should be easy to accomplish and, depending on what the capabilities of Highland are, there are a couple ways to go about it... I'll label that step with a and b options:

*NOTE* This assumes that files opened in Highland will automatically begin converting without the need of pushing a button or anything. If you need to push a button to start the conversion, you're better off looking into Automator actions built into OS X. Hazel manages files but doesn't really have the capability of taking action inside an app.

1) In the Folders section of Hazel, click the plus sign and select your Final Draft Screenplays folder.
2) With the folder selected in the right pane, click the plus sign on the bottom of the "rules" pane on the right.
3) In The pop-up window, give your rule a name and set the following rules:

If [any] of the following rules are met:

[Extension] [is]: fdr (click the plus to add a new rule)
[Extension] [is]: fdx

Do the Following to the Matched File or Folder:
[Open] with application: [Highland] (you will select the app from the Applications folder)

4) Click OK.
5)

a) If you can set a folder for highland to auto-save the converted files to, you can set that up in highland and no further action will be required in Hazel
b) If Highland saves into the same folder by default, you'll need to add another rule for your Final Draft folder with the following settings:

If [all] the following conditions are met:
[Extension] [is]: (whatever the fountain file extension is)

Do the Following to the Matched File or Folder:
[Move] to folder: (select the folder you want these places in here).

6) Click OK
7) Repeat steps 1-6 for your Movie Magic folder, using mmsw in place of fdr/fdx.

And that should get you going. Hope this helps.

[shauxesis]

Jedibugs,

Thank you for the reply, much appreciated!

I followed your steps, and it worked perfectly... to a point. All Final Draft docs opened in Highland without a hitch, and converted automatically. However, the opened/ converted files then failed to save. To do this manually, I do the following in Highland:

File/ Save (Which opens the 'save as' box)
Fountain Scripts folder is already set to default, as is the .fountain extension.
Hit the 'Save' button
Close Highland

Would I need to run an automator script for this last stage, and if so, do you have any advise as to how I could do that?

Thank you again for all your help, you're a rockstar

[jedibugs]

Hey, sorry I missed your reply. In that situation, an Automator workflow would probably be your best bet. I'm not too familiar with Automator, but what I have accomplished in there I just googled what I was trying to do. It's a pretty simple program, so not hard at all to follow along and make any changes specific to your situation.

[shauxesis]

Thanks for your help Jedibugs,

I'll keep searching... Hopefully I will stumble across something