Zhura – still troubling after all these scenes.

UPDATE:

After my FIRST Zhura posting, I told you that I’d tried creating a new doc from a TEXT file to purge the technology demons from my script.

So far less than perfect. I’ve still got niggling problems like whole portions of the script (a dozen pages or more) suddenly and inexplicably becoming BOLD, or the startling LAUNCH of my cursor back to page ONE, or the uninvited random insertion of ACTS while typing.

Speaking of page count, good ol’ Zhura made things more complicated than they needed to be again. While working in EDIT mode, the script appears to be just about 93.5 pages. In VIEW mode, it appears to be the same (a change from earlier in our experience, where I swear there was a differential between the two).

When printed to PDF, we ended up with 97.5 pages. This sucks if you’re trying to use the EDIT or VIEW modes to in any way guesstimate how long your script is.

Just as a goof, I exported the script from Zhura as a TEXT doc. Then took it into FINAL DRAFT. In FD the script is nearly 100 full pages (99.8).

So clearly, somebody’s wrong.

UPS: Totally web based. Simultaneous login allows real-time remote collaboration. Notes features. Upload projects from a variety of applications.

DOWNS: Wierd random buggy glitches  (see above and here). Uneven page count. No text search or search-and-replace.

So Zhura, while free and largely pretty cool, is nevertheless proving to make me very nervous about trusting it with my work. At the very least, I’m going to end up always taking my work into FD to do final polishes if I’m going to have any real sense of page break and page count.