[Feature] Rename "Treatment" to "Outline" and make it display scene titles instead of scene headers

[hyuri]

Right now, the "Treatment" document behaves more like an outline than a treatment. Why not rename it to "Outline" and make small adjustments to make it a proper outlining tool, like make it display scene titles (which are usually the beats) instead of scene headers?

The Treatment

A treatment is a different document. It is:

1. Your story in prose form, telling the reader a summary of what happens in each act or how the movie plays out;
2. Can contain your film's logline;
3. Can contain brief descriptions of each of the main characters;
4. Can contain a brief introduction/synopsis to the story;
5. Some writers even add small bits of important dialogue or loose scene descriptions to their treatments (an extreme example is the "Scriptment" format popularized by writer/director James Cameron).

That's why it can't be automatically mapped to a screenplay full of scene headers or even an outline full of beats. The only thing that can be automatically mapped between treatment/outline/screenplay is the acts. And, in some cases, not even the acts because some writers don't write the acts down into their outlines or screenplays either.

A treatment document should minimally list the acts (if the available in the document) and let us add regular paragraphs of text to them, where we can describe the important stuff in each act. Perhaps, to avoid clutter, the logline, character descriptions and synopsis could be hidden and only available to be displayed when printing the treatment.

Treatment Example (the content is bad, I generated using AI, just to exemplify the structure)

The Outline

An outline, on the other hand, lists the beats of the story and can be directly mapped to a screenplay because each major beat in an outline usually ends up being a scene or sequence in the screenplay.

Outline Example (the content is bad, I generated using AI, just to exemplify the structure)

In the above outline example, I also added a section called "Arcs", that is basically for outlining and keeping track of specific arcs like character arcs, sub-plots, themes etc., each of which can be tagged and colored, are transferable and mapped to the Screenplay document (Acts map to Acts, and beats map to scene titles).

In summary, I would suggest for the short-term:

1. Rename "Treatment" to "Outline";
2. In the now "Outline" document, display scene titles (human-readable name) by default instead of scene headers (the title is usually the beat);

This way, we can actually use this now "Outline" document to outline our stories, and then jump into the Screenplay document and have all of these beats already populated as scene titles so we can start detailing — scene headers, action, dialogue, sequences, etc. That's what most writers I know about do manually anyways, so it'll save us a few steps.

For longer-term, I would also suggest adding the "Arcs" feature within the Outline document as well, as pictured in the example outline above, so that we can outline sub-elements of the story as well, which will make it easier to keep track of important elements within the story.

Additional (separate but connected)

After having this proper Outline document, which is already almost ready (it's only missing displaying scene titles instead of scene headers, and renaming it to Outline), I would suggest making an additional, proper Treatment document as well. It would let us checkmark character descriptions that should be included when printing the Treament, the logline would also be printed, and contain the acts mapped to the Screenplay/Outline documents, letting us freely write in long prose what happens in each act (this prose is only displayed here in the Treatment document).

[dimkanovikov]

Sounds reasonable. I need to think about it!