Script Photo Capture
A photocopy handed to you at the door: most scripts still arrive on paper. Photograph each page and Off-Book reads it in, screenplay or stage play, turning a paper script digital in about the time it takes to shoot it. You check it over and fix anything that came out wrong, and only then does it save. From there it behaves like any other script in your library.
In the order you shot them. Move any page that is out of place.
Paper is still how scripts reach actors. Sides come printed at the audition, rehearsal rooms hand out photocopies, and the playtext you’ve owned for years is a book. None of that is a file you can upload, so the work that could be done on it just doesn’t get done: no units, no actioning, no line-learning against a cue, because the script isn’t in the tool. To digitise a paper script by typing it out is an evening you don’t have the night before a callback.
A camera is the one scanner every actor already carries. Point it at the page and Off-Book reads what’s there: the cue, the speech, the direction inside it, the stage directions, and which of those each line is. It reads stage plays as well as screenplays, and that difference isn’t cosmetic: a playtext sets dialogue out nothing like a screenplay, and a tool that only understands one of them is no use for half an actor’s work.
What it won’t do is quietly decide it got everything right. Reading a photograph is genuinely harder than reading a file: a shadow across the gutter, a tight staple, a page shot at an angle. So the reading is never the last word. Every page lands on a review screen first, where every line is yours to correct before any of it counts. A misread script that saved itself would be worse than no script at all, so saving is a decision you make rather than something that happens to you.
The point of all that checking is what happens after it. Once you save, what lands in your library is exactly what an uploaded file produces: the same parsed script, the same characters, the same scenes. Units & Objectives, Script Actioning, the Rehearsal Studio and the Script Quiz all work off it without ever knowing it began as a photograph. The paper stays in your bag and the work moves.
Take a photo, then the next, then the next, straight on and in good light. Or add photos you already took. A shot of an open script showing two pages is fine, and Off-Book splits it, which is also how a long play fits inside the sixty photos one capture holds.
They start in the order you shot them, so you’re only moving strays, or dropping a page you shot twice. Tapping, never dragging, so it works with a thumb.
One page at a time, so you watch it work rather than a spinner. A page it can’t read is left out and counted instead of guessed at.
Every line is editable, in what it says and in what it is. Name the script and save. Nothing reaches your library until you say so.
It works with the rest of Off-Book