final draft 8 print character sides greyed out

Most PDFs these days have selectable text, so there’s a good chance you’ll be able to copy the text out. In Acrobat or Preview, you can select the text. You see the text, but it’s really an image. Some PDFs are essentially photos of pages. But in these cases, I think you’re better off putting the old script aside and starting at page one. The only scenario in which I can envision retyping a script is if it’s so bad you really do want to rewrite it scene by scene. Spellcheck will catch some typos, but words will get omitted. If you pay someone to do it, it’s expensive. This is the worst option, but back in the days of paper scripts, it was the only option. Update: The folks at Final Draft emailed me to suggest an additional workflow, which I’ll detail after the section on copy-and-paste.

Copy and Paste and Reformat every line.

There are basically three ways to convert from a PDF to Final Draft:

Among my working screenwriter friends, it’s one of the questions I get most. Now it’s been scanned to a PDF - but that still doesn’t get you a script you can edit.

You’ve been hired to rewrite a project, but the producers only have a PDF of the script.

Your hard drive crashed, and the only copy of your screenplay is an old PDF you sent to a friend.

Screenwriters often find themselves with PDF of a screenplay when what they actually need a Final Draft (.fdx) file that they can edit.

Final draft 8 print character sides greyed out