| > There are no other substantive reasons to reject improvements to readability. Inertia and information signalling are substantive reasons in an industry that is governed by convention and lots of networking. Using a different font is a signal to the reader that you are ignorant of industry conventions, and hence less likely to have written a script that will follow acceptable norms--or perhaps worse, that you're a special snowflake who is willing to distract the reader from the content of the screenplay in favor of fiddling with form. This is the same reason why most people don't make stunningly bold typographic choices when writing a resume -- they're not in a position of power, and they're either not confident enough in their own taste or the reader's taste to take any risks. Guides for aspiring scriptwriters basically suggest that you stick to the 'standard format' and not deviate from it [1]. Certainly, if you were writing and submitting scripts, feel free to implement your own suggestions. [1] https://www.writersstore.com/how-to-write-a-screenplay-a-gui... > Using a more readable font doesn't force you to include any more lines of text per page, so the dubious heuristic about page count and screen time wouldn't necessarily even be a casualty So the heuristic would be a casualty, unless you jumped through hoops to make sure it still worked. Does this still sound like a cost-less switch to you? |
Unless somebody has actually done an analysis of how well script page count correlates to screen time with both fixed width and proportional fonts, the most you can assert is that the heuristic of unquantified accuracy might require adjustment. Conventional wisdom that hasn't been subjected to rigorous analysis shouldn't be presumed to be precise. The film industry certainly hasn't given itself much opportunity to accidentally discover it if proportional fonts turn out to yield a better estimator.
The typographic conventions for scripts were not constructed with the purpose of being used for this kind of estimation, thus it would be completely unsurprising if a study were to find it to be 30% off on average; the rule of thumb itself is the product of at least some rounding already. And there's no reason to believe that a re-calibrated heuristic based on more readable typography would need to have higher variance than one based on typewriters, either.
Computing the typewriter page count of a document is such a simple task that the feature could be added to any relevant piece of software in an afternoon. It would make sense to do so even if you're still going to print it out with typewriter formatting, because glancing at a footnote with those statistics is easier for a person to accomplish than counting physical pages.