Appendix B — Glossary

Appendix B — Glossary

Terms used in this manual, in alphabetical order.

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Action A free-form text field on each card for a production note or scene description; pre-filled from the script’s first action line on import. Not overwritten by script re-import. Labelled Synopsis in earlier versions and Comments in the underlying file format. See §6.4.

Batch import An import operation that processes a folder of files in one step rather than picking files individually. Scene Cards supports batch import for images (§7.3) and shoot reports (§10.1.2).

Card The user-facing term for a single scene in Scene Cards. A card occupies one slot on the wall and holds the scene number, location, action text, stills, reference files, and shoot data for that scene. Internally referred to as a tile in the codebase — that term is never used in this manual.

Carousel The horizontal scrolling row of thumbnails at the top of the inspector that shows the reference files attached to a card. Navigate with the chevron buttons (🍎) or by swiping (📐📱).

Cast mode One of four wall views. Cards are grouped into columns by the characters detected in each scene’s dialogue; a scene with more than one speaking character appears under each of them. Nothing is stored — the grouping is recomputed from the script text every time, using the same character-cue detection as the Script Panel (§6.9). Accessed with ⌘⇧4 or the 🎭 button. See §3.2.

Close Gap An action that removes a card from its slot and shifts every subsequent card one position to the left, closing the empty space. The inverse of inserting a blank card. Undoable with ⌘Z. See §5.3.3.

Episode An integer stored on each card that groups scenes by TV episode. Episode 0 is the conventional value for films and pilots. Scene numbers display as EP/SCENE (e.g. 02/14A). See §13.

FDX Final Draft XML — the native file format of Final Draft screenwriting software. Scene Cards reads .fdx files directly as an alternative to PDF import. See §5.1 and Appendix A.

FileWrapper A macOS / iOS framework type that presents a directory on disk as a single document. Scene Cards uses a FileWrapper package for its .scenecards format — the OS shows it as one file, but it is a folder containing payload.json and the Media/ directory. See §18.1.

Hero still The primary image displayed on a card face — a production still, location photograph, storyboard frame, or any image you assign to represent a scene. Stored in Media/thumbnails/. See §7.

iPhone Scene Cards runs on iPhone (iOS 16.6 or later) as well as macOS and iPadOS. On iPhone the wall defaults to 3 cards wide in portrait and 5 in landscape. The toolbar is compact — mode buttons are condensed into a single picker button on narrow screens. All import, scheduling, and reference features available on iPadOS are available on iPhone.

Import Project Data A macOS-only feature that merges selected data (stills, references, shoot reports, etc.) from one Scene Cards document into another. Used to consolidate work done on separate devices or by separate crew members. See §12.

Inspector The panel that shows and edits the fields of a single selected card. Opens as a right-hand sidebar on 🍎 macOS or a bottom sheet on 📐📱 iPadOS and iPhone. See §6.

Location mode One of four wall views. Cards are grouped into columns by their location string; empty groups are hidden. Accessed with ⌘⇧2 or the 📍 button. See §3.2.

Multi-select A selection of two or more cards. When multiple cards are selected, the inspector switches to the Multi-Select Panel, which allows bulk moves but not per-field edits. See §6.8.

OCR (Optical Character Recognition) Text extraction from image-based PDFs using Apple’s Vision framework. Scene Cards falls back to OCR when PDFKit cannot extract selectable text from a script or one-liner PDF. An orange badge marks schedule entries that relied on OCR. See §9.4.4.

OMITTED A card state that marks a scene as cut from the production. An OMITTED card remains on the wall (preserving the slot and number) but is visually distinguished and excluded from character and report tallies. See §5.5.

One-liner A condensed strip-board document — typically one line per scene — used by production to schedule shoot days. Scene Cards parses a one-liner PDF to populate Schedule mode. Also called a strip board. See §9.1.

payload.json The primary data file inside a .scenecards package. A JSON-encoded Payload struct that holds all wall state, tile data, schedule information, and shoot report metadata. See §18.3.

Reference file Any file attached to a card for production reference — storyboards, location photos, rehearsal video, script PDFs, shot lists, etc. Stored in Media/references/ inside the document package. See §8.

Renumber From Here An action that walks the wall starting at the selected card and re-issues sequential scene numbers, preserving suffixes. Used to resync numbering after cards have been inserted or moved. See §5.4.2.

Revision colour A colour applied to a card to indicate which script revision it belongs to — matching the coloured paper used in physical script revisions (white, goldenrod, blue, pink, green, etc.). Set automatically during script import; cannot be changed in the inspector. See §5.7.

Scene heading The formatted scene identifier line in a screenplay: INT. OFFICE — DAY. Scene Cards extracts the location portion (INT. OFFICE) and stores it in the card’s location field (§6.3). Also called a slugline.

Scene mode The default wall view. Cards appear in a continuous left-to-right, top-to-bottom grid. Accessed with ⌘⇧1 or the 🎬 button.

Schedule mode One of four wall views. Cards are grouped by assigned shoot day, with day headers showing the shoot date, crew call, and page count. Accessed with ⌘⇧3 or the 📅 button. See §9.

Script Panel A sidebar (🍎 macOS) or resizable bottom panel (📐📱 iPadOS and iPhone) that displays the raw script text extracted from the PDF for the currently selected scene. Also the interface for assigning character colours. Toggled with the 🔍 button on 📐📱 iPadOS and iPhone, or the left sidebar control on 🍎 macOS. See §3.5 and §6.9.

Security-scoped bookmark A macOS mechanism that allows Scene Cards to re-open a file or folder outside its sandbox on subsequent launches, without requiring the user to pick it again. Used for reference folders linked from external locations. See §8.3.

Shoot day A numbered day in the production schedule, populated from the one-liner import. Cards are assigned to shoot days either automatically (by scene number matching) or manually. See §9.

Shoot data Sound report entries that have been parsed and attached to a card — displayed in the Shoot Data block at the bottom of the inspector. See §6.7.

Slot A fixed position on the wall grid. A slot is either empty or occupied by one card. Slots are numbered sequentially left-to-right, top-to-bottom. The mapping of slots to cards is stored in slotToTile in payload.json.

Slugline See Scene heading.

Sound Devices A brand of professional audio recorder widely used in film and TV production. Scene Cards parses sound reports exported from Sound Devices recorders as PDF or CSV. See §10.2 and Appendix A.

Strip board See One-liner.

Subscription Scene Cards is sold as an annual subscription through the App Store. A 14-day free trial gives full access to all features. After the trial ends without a subscription, documents open in read-only mode. See §1.7.

Suffix An optional letter or letters appended to a scene number to indicate an inserted scene (7A, 7B, 7AA). Stored separately from the scene number integer; auto-uppercased on entry. See §6.2.

Synopsis The earlier name for the Action field — see Action.

Tile The internal / developer term for what this manual calls a card. Used throughout the Swift codebase (Tile.swift, tilesByID, etc.) but not in any user-facing text.

Trial See Subscription.

UTType Apple’s Uniform Type Identifier system for declaring file formats. The Scene Cards document type is com.keithtunney.scenecards. See §18.2.

Vision Apple’s on-device machine learning framework, used by Scene Cards for OCR when a PDF cannot be read as selectable text. See OCR.

Wall The main working area — a grid of cards representing the scenes of a production. The default width is 8 columns on 🍎 macOS, 6 on 📐 iPadOS, and 3 on 📱 iPhone (portrait); width is adjustable by pinching on iPadOS and iPhone. See §3.1.

Zaxcom Nomad A brand of professional audio recorder. Scene Cards parses sound reports from Zaxcom Nomad recorders as PDF. See §10.2 and Appendix A.