Fountain Format Explained: Why Your Script Should Be Plain Text

What Fountain is

Fountain is a plain-text markup format for screenplays. You write in ordinary text with a few light conventions, and any Fountain-aware tool renders it as a correctly formatted screenplay.

That's the entire idea. A `.fountain` file is a text file. You can open it in Notepad, TextEdit, VS Code, or anything else that reads text — today, and in twenty years.

Why that matters more than it sounds

Writers lose work to file formats. Not often, but permanently when it happens.

A proprietary screenplay file is a dependency on one company continuing to exist, continuing to support that format, and continuing to be affordable to you. Most of the time that's fine. Occasionally it isn't, and the failure mode is that a script you wrote is trapped in a file you can't open.

Plain text has no such failure mode. There is no version of the future where a text file becomes unreadable.

There's a second benefit that matters if you work with others: plain text diffs cleanly. You can put a Fountain script in version control and see exactly what changed between drafts, line by line. No screenplay-specific tooling required.

The syntax, more or less all of it

Fountain is designed so that a screenplay written naturally is already mostly valid Fountain.

Scene headings — any line starting with INT, EXT, EST, INT./EXT, or I/E:

```

INT. KITCHEN - NIGHT

```

Action — just write it. Any line that isn't something else is action:

```

MAYA stands at the sink, not washing anything.

```

Character cues — a line in all caps, followed by dialogue:

```

MAYA

I heard you the first time.

```

Parentheticals — a line in brackets under the character cue:

```

MAYA

(not turning around)

I heard you the first time.

```

Transitions — a line in caps ending in TO:

```

CUT TO:

```

Dual dialogue — add a caret to the second character cue:

```

MAYA

Fine.

DEV ^

Fine.

```

Emphasis — asterisks and underscores, as you'd expect: `italics`, `bold`, `_underline_`.

That's the bulk of it. There's more — title pages, sections, synopses, notes, page breaks — but you can write a complete feature knowing only the above.

Where the format came from

Fountain was created by John August, Nima Yousefi, Stu Maschwitz, Jonathan Poritsky and Martin Vilcans, and released in 2012. August is a working screenwriter (Big Fish, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), which shows in the design — the syntax gets out of the way rather than demanding attention.

It's an open specification. Anyone can implement it, and many tools have.

What Fountain doesn't do

Being honest about the limits:

• No formatting preview while you type, unless your editor provides one. If you write in a plain text editor, you see plain text.
• No production revision tracking on its own. Coloured pages, locked pages and A-pages are production conventions layered on top by whatever tool you use — Fountain itself doesn't encode them.
• Not the studio deliverable. If a studio or showrunner asks for a file, they will very likely mean `.fdx`. Fountain converts, but it isn't what they'll ask for.

For specs, indie features, shorts and content work, none of that matters. For studio television, the `.fdx` expectation is real.

Why we store scripts this way

ScenePaper's Writers' Room stores scripts in Fountain rather than a proprietary format, for exactly the reason above: your archive shouldn't depend on us continuing to exist.

It also means importing is trivial. Most modern screenwriting tools — WriterDuet, Arc Studio, and others — export Fountain directly, so moving a script in takes seconds and loses nothing.

And because the script is text, it can be broken down, scheduled and turned into call sheets inside the same project without any export step at all.

Getting started

Write a scene in any text editor using the conventions above. Save it with a `.fountain` extension. Open it in any Fountain-aware tool.

It'll be a correctly formatted screenplay. That's the whole trick — and it cost you nothing.