I’m actually pretty dialed in on the number of lines and characters per line, since I use the exact font in my text editor that will be used in the AE render, and the program is set up with proper column width.

So for example, the character count per line is usually no more than 27, including spaces. That means ‘The New Republic is in crisis.’ would be too long, as it takes 30 characters including some capitalized letters. You can of course fudge the margins with spacing like the theatrical version, but one of my self-imposed restraints is to do this as little as possible.

With regards to the number of lines, I’m using 21 lines of text since that’s the number of lines in the crawl for ANH, and it happens to line up well with the music and timing of my bespoke crawl.

Fair enough on it being too wordy, as there has always been a ton of information to convey in this crawl and it’s one of the reasons that I’ve literally done hundreds of versions over several years. It’s simply the case that not all of the information can be conveyed in 88 words. Interestingly, that’s identical to the word count of the theatrical version so the only real change is that the average word length has increased slightly.

This is all to say that I definitely get where you’re coming from, but a lot of crawl rewrites I have to discard out of hand due to line length or line number. The 4-9-8 line numbers are set in stone for this project, for good or ill 😉