Why should Fountain support a title page? Fountain follows this standard, and only expects pagination on WYSIWYG preview or formatted output. Instead, the apps perform the pagination on-the-fly as you work. Most screenplay file formats do not store pagination, except for explicit page breaks. These things are silently stripped out and lost.įountain is robust enough to be the primary working document format for your screenplay, not something you export to and lose a bunch of your work. There's no support for text styles, dual dialogue, or centered text. The next time you open that same document in a Fountain-compatible app, all the new work will be there, formatted as you'd expect.ĭon't Final Draft, Movie Magic Screenwriter, Celtx, and many other screenwriting apps import and export plain text already? Most importantly though, you can work on your screenplay without needing to know anything about the syntax. When you first look at a Fountain document in a text editor, you'll see some special characters, but it will probably be quite clear to you what they mean. You would only need to learn the syntax if you wanted to take advantage of the 'power user' features, such as 'forced' formatting, or emphasis. Syntax? I'm a screenwriter Jim, not a nerd.įountain is designed to 'just work' if you simply typed some text that looked like a screenplay. Fountain allows screenwriters the flexibility to make changes to their screenplays from anywhere, using nothing more than a cloud-enabled text editing app. It's the butt in the chair that gets the words on the page.īut sometimes the butt is on a plane, or in a lobby waiting for a meeting, or in line at the DMV. Nerdy maybe, but in practice it's quite the opposite of distracting. You might think that formatting text by typing special characters is nerdy and distracting. The popular Markdown syntax is valuable for text editing because it allows you to add formatting while maintaining this portability and compatibility. You can edit them anywhere, on just about any device, and never break anything. Once you start working with plain text documents, you realize the power of their infinite portability and compatibility.

When you're ready to share or print your work, or move to another writing tool, use one of the growing list of Fountain apps to preview your screenplay with industry-standard formatting, export it to HTML or Final Draft.

REVERSE to Will's mother Sandra (53), surprised and a little annoyed. The front door opens to reveal Will and Josephine on the porch with their bags. If you opened a text editing app, or even email, and started typing something that looked like a screenplay, chances are, you're using Fountain. It's a simple set of straightforward rules for writing a screenplay in plain text.

Movie magic screenwriter app