Fountain Screenplay Formatter

Fountain: the Markdown of screenwriting

Fountain is a plain-text markup language for screenplays, designed in 2011 by screenwriter John August (Big Fish, Charlie's Angels, Aladdin 2019) together with Stu Maschwitz, Nima Yousefi, and others. The pitch is the same as Markdown's for prose: write in any text editor, version the file in git, never lose work to a corrupted proprietary binary, and let tooling render the final look. The spec lives at fountain.io and is intentionally minimal so any screenwriter can learn it in an afternoon.

The standard format follows decades of Hollywood convention — Courier 12pt, specific margins, 1 page ≈ 1 minute of screen time. The hard part is not the formatting but the discipline of staying in it: Fountain bakes the discipline into the syntax itself.

Syntax cheat sheet

Six element types cover 95% of any script:

Title: The Last Coffee
Credit: Written by
Author: Jane Doe

INT. COFFEE SHOP - DAY                    ← scene heading (slugline)

Alice sits reading. Bruno rushes in.       ← action

BRUNO                                      ← character (ALL CAPS)
(out of breath)                            ← parenthetical
Sorry I'm late.

ALICE
It's fine.

> FADE OUT.                                ← transition

• Scene heading: starts with INT., EXT., EST., I/E., etc.
• Character: a line in ALL CAPS with no period at the end
• Dialogue: any text immediately after a character cue
• Parenthetical: (quiet), (into phone) on its own line under the character
• Transition: a line ending in TO: or starting with >
• Title page: key: value pairs at the top, blank line below

Tooling: writers, exporters, renderers

The traditional industry standard is Final Draft ($249, proprietary FDX format) — required by most studio submission portals. Fountain lets you escape that lock-in for the drafting phase, then export to FDX when contracts demand it. Native Fountain editors:

• Highland 2 ($30, Mac) — built by John August's company Quote-Unquote Apps
• Slugline ($45, Mac) — minimalist, distraction-free
• Fade In ($80, cross-platform) — closest feature parity with Final Draft
• Beat (free, open source, Mac) — open governance, very active
• Trelby (free, cross-platform) — long-running open source that introduced Fountain import
• afterwriting.com — render Fountain to PDF in the browser

CLI: npm install fountain-tools parses Fountain to a structured AST you can transform into HTML, PDF or FDX. GitHub renders .fountain files as formatted screenplay when committed.

Why screenwriters version control

A Final Draft FDX is a zipped XML bundle — opaque to git diff, fragile to merge. A Fountain file is plain UTF-8 — pull requests, branches per act, redlines as commits. The Brazilian streaming industry (Globoplay originals, Netflix BR) still standardises on Final Draft, but writers' rooms are quietly adopting Fountain for first drafts and switching to FDX only at delivery. The same git habits that won over novelists (Scrivener users defecting to Markdown) are reaching screenwriters now.

FAQ

Does Fountain replace Final Draft? For drafting, yes — for studio delivery, you still export to FDX. Highland 2 and Fade In handle the conversion in one click.

How long to learn the syntax? Under an hour. Six element types map onto formatting cues every screenwriter already knows; the editor enforces them visually.

Can I produce a print-ready PDF? Yes. afterwriting.com and Highland render Courier 12 with WGA-spec margins straight to PDF.

Is Fountain accepted by the WGA? The Writers Guild of America accepts FDX or PDF for registration. Write in Fountain, deliver in FDX or PDF.