Edda 5.0: Screenplays, Poetry and Song Lyrics

Three new editors

Until now, every Edda project was a manuscript of chapters and scenes. That suits a novel. It is the wrong shape for a screenplay, a poetry collection or an album. In 5.0 you pick what you are writing when you create a project, and Edda opens the editor that fits it. You can also change the type of a project you already have. Novels and every other kind of prose work exactly as before.

Each of these projects can hold as many documents as you like: a pilot and its episodes, a whole collection of poems, or every song on a record.

The Screenplay editor

Scripts are written in Fountain, the plain-text screenplay format, with a formatted page preview beside the text as you type. Tab and Enter move between scene headings, action, character cues, dialogue and transitions, following the same conventions as Final Draft, so you rarely touch the mouse.

• Industry formatting: Courier 12 on US Letter, a title page, (MORE) and (CONT'D) across page breaks, and dual dialogue.
• A real page count. The page count in the toolbar matches the PDF you export, so "one page, one minute" means something.
• Outline and index cards. A scene list follows you as you write. Switch to cards to drag scenes into a new order and write a synopsis for each one.
• Scene numbers, locked pages and revisions. Lock a draft for production and new scenes get A-numbers, cut scenes are marked OMITTED, and changes since a snapshot are marked in the margin.
• A script report showing each character's speeches, words and scenes, plus interior/exterior and day/night breakdowns.
• Import and export: Final Draft (.fdx), Fountain and Highland files in; Final Draft, Fountain, PDF, Word and EPUB out.

The Poetry editor

Choose from more than 40 forms, from haiku and tanka to sonnets, villanelles, ghazals, sestinas and the golden shovel. A gutter beside each line shows its syllable count and rhyme letter, and a guide explains the form's rules and checks your line count as you write. Free verse is there too, for when you want no rules at all.

The Song Lyrics editor

Songs are built from sections: intro, verse, pre-chorus, chorus, bridge, hook and outro. Move them up and down, duplicate a chorus, and turn on syllable counts, rhyme scheme, chord lines and melody notes when you need them.

Everything else you would expect

Scripts, poems and lyrics are full citizens of Edda, not a bolt-on. They are covered by History snapshots, backups and folder or Google Drive sync, they count toward your word goals, and they compile to PDF, Word and EPUB with their line breaks intact. Search has been rebuilt as well: it now finds results inside your scripts, poems and songs, alongside characters, places and chapters.

5.0 also carries a long list of fixes across the app, including a PDF export bug that could add blank pages to long manuscripts.

Getting 5.0

Edda 5.0 is available now for Windows, macOS (Apple Silicon), Linux and Android. If you already own Edda, it is a free update and your installed copy will update itself. You can also grab it from the download page. As always, everything runs offline and your work stays on your own device.

Want to see it first? The live demo now runs 5.0, so you can write a scene or a sonnet right in your browser.