You finish a play, open a festival’s submission guidelines, and find another job waiting: change the font, adjust the margins, and check the spacing. The same text needs a different outfit before anyone will read it.
Ask which layout is correct and the answers arrive with considerable confidence. Character names belong in the centre. Or on the left. Someone usually has a published script to prove it.
Treating the position of a character name as a test of whether someone understands theatre is a lot to ask of a margin.
Even the formatting guides offer a choice
The Dramatists Guild’s formatting resource offers modern, traditional, musical, and Samuel French examples, explicitly calling them “guidelines, not requirements.” There are established conventions, but no single layout used by every theatre, publisher, and festival.
The different uses of a script help explain why. A compact printed edition can put a character’s name beside the first line of speech. A submission manuscript might give each cue its own line so speakers are easy to spot. A rehearsal copy may need wider margins for notes.
Each choice does something useful. A narrow dialogue column makes speeches distinct but wraps them onto more lines. Generous spacing separates cues but adds pages. The question is whether the layout helps its particular reader follow the play.
Labels such as “American” and “British” can identify familiar conventions. They still cannot tell you exactly what the festival you are entering expects.
“Standard format” still needs a definition
For its competition with a May 2026 deadline, the Community Theatre Association of Michigan specified 12-point Courier New, single spacing, and bold capitalised character names centred above speeches. CTAM guidelines.
The Theatre Network of Texas’s POPS! guidelines for the competition announcing winners in March 2026 accepted either 12-point Times New Roman or 12-point Courier. POPS! guidelines.
These are requirements for particular competition cycles. Check the call you are entering, including paper size, margins, spacing, and any instructions about anonymous submissions.
Organisers should be specific too. If a formatting rule is strict enough to disqualify a script, it ought to be precise enough to follow. “Use standard format” leaves a lot unsaid.
Page limits make that precision especially important. The same play can occupy different numbers of pages without losing a word. Reducing the space around the dialogue will not make the audience go home earlier. For an estimate of running time, a timed reading is more useful than a tighter margin.
Keep the text separate from its appearance
The script contains words and structure: who speaks, what they say, where a scene begins, which passage is a stage direction. Alignment, indentation, and spacing describe how that structure appears on a page. Those decisions should be able to change independently.
When spaces and tabs are the only thing distinguishing character names, moving every cue becomes a manual job. If the document identifies them as character cues, the editor can change their appearance together.
Paragraph styles in a word processor already use this principle. A readable text syntax can carry it further by describing the script’s structure without relying on a particular visual layout. The text can be opened, copied, and moved while retaining the information needed to distinguish dialogue from directions.
That separation gives the writer room to work. A submission copy can follow a festival’s requirements; a rehearsal copy can leave space for notes. You change the presentation of one script instead of maintaining several manually formatted versions that gradually drift apart.
Choosing where a name sits on the page should never make the words harder to take somewhere else.
A new layout without rebuilding the script
Stagistic Syntax stores the script and its structure in a readable, portable .stagistic text file. You can open it in an ordinary text editor; the words do not depend on how a particular application displays them.
Stagistic Editor provides the visual working environment, with customisable alignment, indentation, spacing, and text styles for each block type. Change a type’s appearance once and it updates throughout the script. Preparing a different layout becomes a few settings changes, while the underlying text stays the same.