The Scratchpad is a handy place to keep notes and another of Celtx's writing assistants. I have the outline of "Portals" in mine for easy referral.
- To open, click on the Scratchpad tab at the bottom of your screen and the scratchpad appears over the bottom of the script window, as shown in the following screenshot:
- If you click one of the other tabs (Script, Typeset/PDF, and so on), the scratchpad hides itself until the next time it's needed. While open, move the mouse cursor over its top edge, press the left button, and drag it to make it larger if needed. The next time the scratchpad is opened, that size will be remembered.
Another use of the scratchpad would be to save bits of dialog or other information. There are two ways to do this. In the script editing window, we can select text (see the following screenshot) and then right click to bring up the Script Editor Context Menu (the small pop up menu below).
- Click on Send to Scratchpad to remove the text and put it in the scratchpad. Click on Copy to leave it in place.
- Then, at the bottom of your screen, click on the Scratchpad tab, move the cursor in the scratchpad to where you want the text copied, and press Ctrl+V to paste it in place.
We've now saved that snippet of dialog to the Scratchpad.
The size of information you keep in the scratchpad is limited only by your hard disk size. The scratchpad is unique to each project.
The scratchpad feature discussed earlier, might be thought of as a legal pad or notebook; we can have page upon page of information but nothing is tied to a specific point in the project. Now embedded notes are more like those yellow sticky notes. We jot something down on the pad, rip off the note, and stick it at a certain place.
The following figure is an example. Look at Fred's dialog at the very bottom. There is a little note icon next to the dialog. This symbol does not print but it alerts us to the fact that an embedded note has been stuck there. Double-clicking on the icon shows the note, as shown in the following screenshot, on the upper right. Notice that it is time and date stamped depending on when it was added:
