Features Markup
Mark a line without stopping to write about it.
A mark, a colour, a bracket, twenty characters. It sits in the margin beside the line, it never moves your script to make room, and it never reaches the printed page.
CmdE opens Markup
Watch it work
A brief look at Markup.
Prefer to read? Everything in the video is on this page below.
The proof
It sits in the margin, and it stays there.
INT. CANNERY ROW – DAWN
Fog comes off the water in slow sheets. A row of dead storefronts, LEASE signs curling in the windows like old tongues.
DARCY (40s, a good coat gone shapeless) walks the cracked sidewalk the way a man counts stairs in the dark.
INT. SALVATORE’S DINER – MORNING
Vinyl booths. Coffee that has been on since Tuesday. Darcy sits with his back to the wall.Love this!
VIK (V.O.)
(filtered, phone)
You find her yet?
DARCY
I found the address. Finding her is a different invoice.Cut this!
VIK (V.O.)
Eleven thousand, four hundred. Her late husband’s number, not hers.
He hangs up before Vik can make it a speech.
EXT. ROWHOUSE – DUSK
A narrow brick face, three steps up. A child’s chalk drawing has gone soft off the bottom stair.Works
Markup moves with your elements. A mark belongs to the element, not to a spot on the page, so when you move a scene with Reorder its marks go with it. Nothing needs reconnecting, and nothing is left pointing at the wrong line.
Mark · Color tag
Five that already mean something, ten that mean whatever you decide.
A block holds one or the other, never both. Which is the whole design: one glyph in the margin, so a page of marks stays readable at a glance.
Mark
Fixed meanings, so a collaborator opening your script reads them the way you wrote them.
- Works the content is landing
- Cut this should come out
- Favorite keep this one
- Unclear the intent is not landing
- Rewrite right idea, wrong words
Color tag
No prescribed meaning, on purpose. Ten colours, no opinion about what any of them is for. What they end up meaning is yours to decide, and you can rename them.
- Accent
- Red
- Orange
- Yellow
- Green
- Cyan
- Blue
- Purple
- Pink
- Indigo
Use cases
What writers actually use it for.
Markup is deliberately small. Six ways that smallness turns out to be the point.
The read-through
Mark now, fix later.
Read your draft end to end without stopping to rewrite. Anything that snags gets a mark and you keep going. The gutter becomes your to-do list, and the read stays a read.
Notes on a call
Catch a note before it evaporates.
A producer is talking and you are typing. Twenty characters is enough for “she’d never say this” and fast enough to keep up. You are not writing a memo, you are dropping a pin.
The structural pass
See the shape of the script in the margin.
Name your colours for what you are tracking, Setup, Payoff, Exposition, and tag as you read. Scroll back and the balance of the script is visible as a column of colour before you have read a word.
A sequence, not a line
Bracket the part that drags.
Some problems are not one element long. Begins here, ends here, and the whole run carries the note. Useful for a sequence that sags, a subplot that vanishes, a tone that slips for six pages.
The writers room
Keep the issue in front of everyone.
Marks made in a session are attributed and cannot be deleted while it runs. That is deliberate: a mark is there to hold a problem open for the group, not to be quietly walked back before anyone else sees it.
Handing it out
The marked-up copy is the clean copy.
No second file, no stripping pass, no version of your script that exists only to be safe to send. Markup never prints, so the draft you have been scribbling on all week is already the one you email.
Quick notes
Twenty characters, and that is the feature.
The note renders in the gutter beside the line, so it has to be readable at a glance from the margin. That cap is what keeps Markup a marking tool instead of a second notes panel. When you need a paragraph, you need Script Notes, and that is a different button.
Ships with the app
Nine presets, one click each. Add up to twenty of your own, twenty characters apiece.
- Show don’t tell.
- Tone is off.
- Rewrite.
- Cut this.
- Expand this.
- Not working.
- Pacing drags here.
- Does this land?
- Is this necessary?
In the margin, and nowhere else
Click any gutter icon to jump straight to it.
Marks and colour tags draw as filled shapes in the left gutter, spans as arrows beside them. Clicking one opens Markup with the cursor already on that element. A toggle in the panel header hides every icon when you want a clean page to read.
- 5Marks
- 10Colour tags
- 500Marks per script