About once a month, someone writes to ask me if there's a great piece of software for writing comic book scripts. My stock answer, which I've been cutting 'n' pasting into replies for many a year now goes something like this…
No, I'm afraid there's no software out there I can recommend for the writing of comic book scripts. I work in Microsoft Word using a set of macros that I wrote for myself years ago. They're not perfect (neither are my scripts) and I don't give them out to anyone because I'd have to write a long set of instructions on how to use them and you still wouldn't find them to be ideal.
I answered the question again tonight and it got me to wondering: Am I outta date on this? Is there great software that will automate the task of funnybook scripting? And if there isn't, why isn't there? I don't think it would be a hard thing to craft, especially if you did it as a Word template and knew how they work. Movie Magic Screenwriter, which is what I use for the writing of TV and movie scripts, has a comic book script template but it's not very useful for that purpose. It doesn't automatically number pages or panels, for instance.
Oddly enough, in all the years I've been writing comics and hanging around with others who do this, I can't recall a lot of discussion about software…and none at all in the last fifteen years or so. Anyone have a thought on this?