What happens to screenplay annotations when a revision arrives

You have spent a week marking up a script. Then the blue revision lands. The question every department asks at that moment is the same: do I have to do all that again?

Mostly, no. SceneMatch attaches each mark to the words you selected, not to a position on the page. When a revision comes in, marks move with their words. But some of them will go quiet, and it is worth understanding which — because a mark that disappears is itself telling you something.

What a mark is actually attached to

When you highlight a line, leave a note or reference a prop, SceneMatch stores the exact text you selected along with a little of the text either side of it. That is the anchor. It does not store "line 14, characters 2 to 10", because a revision would invalidate that immediately.

This is why marks survive edits that would otherwise break them.

Which marks carry over

A revision is matched to the existing script scene by scene. When a scene keeps its number, its annotations come across onto the new version of that scene, and the viewer then re-finds each one:

• The line is untouched. The mark reappears exactly where it was.
• The line was edited around your words. A sentence added at the front pushes your words to the right; the mark follows them.
• The line moved. New action inserted above pushes your line further down the scene; the mark still finds its words and repaints there.

In all three cases you do nothing. Open the script and the marks are where they should be.

Which marks go quiet, and why

A mark can only survive if the words it was placed on are still there. Three things break that:

• The words were rewritten. You highlighted zephyr and the revision says breeze. The quote no longer exists, so the mark has nothing to hold.
• The line was cut. Same result, more obviously.
• The line changed kind. This is the one that surprises people. If a line was action and the revision turns it into a different kind of paragraph, the words can still be on screen, spelled identically — but the mark will not reattach to it.

There is no warning badge for this. The mark simply stops appearing.

The thing that is not obvious

A disappeared mark is a signal, not a fault. Every one of the three cases above means the same thing: this line is not the line you marked. It was rewritten, cut, or restructured.

So when you open a revised script and a highlight is missing, do not just put it back. Read the line first. Something changed there, and finding out what is exactly the work a revision is asking you to do. The marks that vanish are a shortlist of what to re-read.

What this means scene by scene

If a scene is renumbered or removed in a revision, its annotations do not migrate — there is no scene for them to migrate to. Marks survive on scenes that keep their number. That is worth knowing before a heavy renumbering pass: the more scene numbers change, the more marking-up you will be redoing.