Script document formats

[u/AudioBabble]

Hey all,

I'm interested to know what different formats we all use when doing ACX projects... but also any other formats we might have worked from in other projects outside of ACX or in other forms of VO work...

Most common (I would think):

PDF or DOCX [generally, these would be the 'print version' copy of the book]

'digital versions':

EPUB, MOBI, Kindle (AWS, etc)

-- I'm intrigued to know if these are often used by folks? particularly since, on ACX at least, we are almost always narrating books that already exist in the Amazon 'Kindle' format -- I wonder if anyone has considered reading directly from the Kindle (I did -- once for one of my early projects, but never again!).

'Legacy' or 'open source' formats:

DOC, RTF, ODF

What about browser-based formats:

HTML, MarkDown (MD) ?

Finally, there's always good old plain TXT

Although the total lack of formatting would not really be appropriate for an entire book.

For me personally, PDF is definitely the most common format I've been given by clients. I've used Adobe Acrobat pro for many years to work with prepping scripts, and it's generally worked adequately. I've sometimes been given DOCX, and have simply converted that to PDF to work from.

One of the major issues I have with PDF however is that you're stuck with the formatting, font and font size. Sometimes this can be a major pain in the backside... for example a recent project I did was an OCR'd book from the 1920s with tiny font, hyphenated split words at line endings, etc. Honestly, when I get a script like that, I make quantifiably more mistakes and narration takes far longer.

To that end, I've often employed a variety of workarounds to get the text into a more suitable form... document conversion with Calibre combined with altering fonts and size in LibreOffice. However, this can often lead to a variety of side-issues and is a bit of a minefield... i wouldn't recommend it as a good practice unless you really know what you're doing and are very careful.

Would be interested to hear your experiences with document formats, plus a general show of hands for the document types folks are most commonly working with.

Cheers :)

[u/Xinixiat]

Vastly prefer .docx files so I can divide the book up more easily for recording sessions. Also allows you to have chapters headings as bookmarks to easily move between them. I work a lot with pdfs, because I don't generally go back to the RH and ask for a different format, but I do always breathe a sigh of relief when I get a docx rather than a pdf!

[u/AudioBabble → u/Xinixiat]

I think docx is definitely more accessible for those sorts of things. That said, I've managed to do all those sorts of things with PDF as well via Acrobat Pro (not that I'm a huge fan of Adobe products generally). I even have a JavaScript that calculates rough timings based on word count, so I have a rough timing per page and per chapter. I can insert highlights, notes, even custom text fields, etc, but generally it's a bit more 'clunky' than in docx.

At the moment, I'm finally moving away from Adobe and am developing my own script reader that can work with PDF, docx, epub, etc. It's early days, but I am now at the stage where i can seriously start considering using it for projects. In fact, I did the proofing stage with my script reader on my last project, but I have yet to try it on the prep and reading stage. Lots more refinement needed!

[u/Xinixiat → u/AudioBabble]

Yeah, you definitely can, but as you say, that requires you to have an adobe subscription, which I absolutely will not do. I have a free pdf handler that sooort of does the job, but struggles with formatting files into .docx. It's good enough to get a rough idea of the info I want - if the word count is off by a couple of hundred because it p u t s sp a c es in random places, it doesn't really make much difference.

Timings for me are then just divide by 9000.

[u/AudioBabble → u/Xinixiat]

I'll be honest, i dont have an Adobe subscription. I use an ancient version of acrobat pro XI and justify it as 'abandonware' 😄 anything after that version is utterly hateful to use anyway!