Trelby for Windows

Anyone who's ever tried screenwriting knows that there's a specific format that must be followed, and anyone who's ever attempted this task in a typical word processing program knows that this format can be a real pain in the butt. Trelby is an easy-to-use screenwriting program that does the formatting for you and includes several other helpful tools that let you focus on telling your story instead of fiddling with margins.

Trelby's interface isn't stunningly beautiful, but it's easy to navigate, with a few menus across the top and a toolbar down the left side. Although the program looks a lot like a typical word processor at first glance, once you start typing you realize how different it is. Trelby knows how to lay out a screenplay, and all you have to do is either tab or press Enter to properly format the next character, action, or line of dialogue. Hints in the upper right corner got us started, but in no time at all we were typing along and properly formatting our screenplay without even thinking about it. We were surprised by how quickly we picked up on it; it's actually quite intuitive. In addition to its formatting magic, Trelby also lets you run reports to get information about the locations, scenes, characters, and dialogue present within the screenplay. There's even a built-in name database to help you figure out who your characters are. Scripts can be saved either as Trelby files or PDFs. A built-in Help file provides plenty of information about how to use Trelby, but it's fairly easy to figure out with a bit of experimentation. Overall, we were quite impressed with Trelby, and we think anyone writing for the silver or small screen would be foolish not to try it out.

Trelby installs a desktop icon without asking but uninstalls cleanly.

New features:

• Undo/redo.
• Fountain import/export support.
• Adobe Story import support.
• Fade In Pro import support.
• Install directory is configurable on Windows.
• Text import can optionally ignore certain lines.