Fountain, formerly known as Screenplay Markdown, is a simple markup syntax for writing, editing and sharing screenplays in plain, human-readable text. Fountain allows you to work on your screenplay anywhere, on any computer, tablet, or phone using any software that edits text files.
Fountain is a simple set of straightforward rules for writing a screenplay in plain text. Because the Fountain syntax is built around a few cues, spacing and letter case, it doesn’t feel like writing code, and it’s very easy to learn quickly.
Fountain allows you to write screenplays in any text editor on any device. Because it’s just text, it’s portable and future-proof.
The goal of Fountain is to allow you to write an entire screenplay with it, and easily export and/or print something that a colleague could read and provide feedback.
Fountain is inspired by John Gruber’s Markdown language. It uses some of Markdown’s conventions, but Fountain is not Markdown. It’s a good format for archiving screenplays as it’s future-proof. Write without the worry of file-format obsolescence or incompatibility.
Rules of the language:
- Slugs are capitalized (as usual).
- Character headings for dialogue are capitalized and terminated with a newline (as usual). No whitespace between the character name and the dialogue block. No whitespace between dialogue paragraphs, only newlines.
- Action blocks are separated by one blank line.
- Transitions get placed in **double asterisks**.
Website: fountain.io
Support: Syntax, FAQ, GitHub code repository
Developer: Stu Maschwitz, Nima Yousefi, John August
License: MIT License
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