Fountain: screenplays in plain text

Fountain is a way of writing a screenplay as plain text, so that it reads like a script in any text editor and turns into a properly formatted script in a screenwriting app. Its syntax is public, at fountain.io. Cold Open, a free screenwriting app, uses Fountain as its own format.

What it looks like

INT. FERRY TERMINAL - NIGHT

Rain sheets down the long windows.

NORA
You were supposed to be here at nine.

ELI
(beat)
There's two now. They built one.

CUT TO:

A line in capitals that starts with INT. or EXT. is a scene heading. A name in capitals with a line under it is a character, and the line under it is dialogue. Words in brackets under a name are a parenthetical. A capitalized line ending in TO: is a transition. Everything else is action.

Why plain text helps

• It opens anywhere, today and in twenty years: on a phone, in a text editor, in an email.
• It's yours. No program is needed to read it, so no program can lock it away.
• It works with version control. Git and other tools show exactly which lines changed between drafts.
• It's small, and easy to search, back up and sync.

Fountain in Cold Open

• Open a .fountain file and save it back as .fountain. Cold Open writes standard Fountain, with notes, boneyard, sections, synopses, dual dialogue and the title page.
• You don't have to know the syntax. You type on a formatted page: Enter and Tab move from scene heading to action to character to dialogue, and Cold Open writes the Fountain.
• Exchange with Final Draft users by saving a copy as .fdx, or open their .fdx files and save a copy as Fountain.
• Extras Fountain can't hold, such as tracked changes and revision colors, go in a Cold Open project file. Cold Open asks before a save would lose them.

The user guide has a fuller Fountain primer.