Script

Fountain

What is fountain in film production?

Fountain is a plain-text markup format for screenplays. A Fountain file is readable as ordinary text and needs no proprietary software, but carries enough convention — capitalised scene headings, centred character names, indented parentheticals — for software to render it as correctly formatted script pages.

Its practical advantage is durability and diffability. A Fountain script opens in any text editor in thirty years, works with ordinary version control, and produces meaningful diffs between drafts — none of which is true of a binary screenplay file.

Because it is plain text, it also works in any language and any script. Screenplays in Hindi, Tamil or Malayalam are written in Fountain the same way English ones are.

Go deeper

Reviewed 2026-08-27

Related terms

Scene heading: A scene heading is the capitalised line that opens every scene in a screenplay, stating whether the scene is interior or exterior, where it takes place, and whether it is day or night — for example, INT. EDIT SUITE - NIGHT. It is the line scheduling software parses to build a breakdown.
Coloured pages: Coloured pages are script revisions distributed on tinted paper so that everyone can see at a glance which draft they are holding. Each new revision takes the next colour in a fixed sequence, and only the changed pages are reissued rather than the whole script.
Sides: Sides are the extract of a script containing only the scenes being shot on a given day, printed small and distributed to cast and crew on set. They are a working reference for the day's pages, not a copy of the screenplay, and are usually generated from the call sheet's scene list.