What Is Fountain? The Plain-Text Screenplay Format Explained

Somewhere on an old hard drive, there's probably a screenplay you can no longer open. Maybe it's locked in a discontinued app's proprietary file, or a version of software that no longer runs. Fountain format exists to make sure that never happens again. Fountain is a plain-text screenwriting format: a set of simple conventions that let you write a fully formatted screenplay in any text editor — Notepad, an email draft, your phone's notes app — and have software render it as a perfect, industry-standard script. If you can type, you already know most of Fountain.

Why Plain Text Screenwriting Exists

Fountain was created in the early 2010s by screenwriter John August (Big Fish, Charlie's Angels) and developer Nima Yousefi, merging with a parallel effort by Stu Maschwitz. Their frustration was simple: screenwriting was chained to specific applications. Your script lived inside one program's file format, and if that program died, changed, or wasn't installed on the machine in front of you, your work was hostage.

Their insight was that screenplay format is so rigid and conventional that a parser can infer almost everything from the text itself. A line reading INT. DINER - NIGHT can only be a scene heading. A line in all caps followed by an indented-looking sentence is obviously a character cue and dialogue. So why not let writers just type, and let software do the layout?

The result is a format that is:

• Future-proof. A .fountain file is a .txt file with a different extension. It will open on any computer made in the last forty years and any computer made in the next forty.
• Portable. Write on your laptop, continue on your phone, paste a scene into a message. No export step, no compatibility matrix.
• Version-control friendly. Because it's plain text, Fountain works beautifully with tools like Git, and file diffs actually show what changed between drafts.
• Free and open. The spec is public. No one owns your screenplay's format.

Fountain Syntax: The Basics

Here's a scene written in raw Fountain, exactly as you'd type it:

INT. LIGHTHOUSE - NIGHT

The lamp room. Wind HOWLS against the glass. EDITH, 70s,
oilskin coat still dripping, cranks the mechanism by hand.

EDITH
(without turning)
You're late.

TOM
The road's washed out.

EDITH
The road's been washed out for
thirty years. You're late.

CUT TO:

Notice something? That's just... a screenplay. No markup, no tags. Fountain's rules are mostly things you'd do naturally:

• Scene headings are any line starting with INT., EXT., EST., or I/E. You can force one with a leading period, like .FLASHBACK - BEACH.
• Character cues are lines in ALL CAPS with a blank line before them. Dialogue is whatever follows on the next line.
• Parentheticals are lines in parentheses between the cue and the dialogue.
• Action is anything else. Just write.
• Transitions are all-caps lines ending in TO:, or anything forced with a leading > like > SMASH CUT.

A few deliberate additions handle what plain typing can't:

• *italics*, **bold**, and _underline_ for emphasis
• @ forces a character cue that isn't all-caps, like @McCONAUGHEY
• ~ marks lyric lines
• = This is a synopsis and # Act One create outline structure that renders invisibly
• /* ... */ marks "boneyard" text — cut material you're not ready to delete
• Notes to yourself go in [[double brackets]] and never print

That's essentially the whole language. You can learn Fountain in ten minutes, and after a day you stop noticing it exists — which is the point.

What Fountain Is Great At (and Where It Fits)

Fountain shines brightest at the two ends of the process. Drafting: when the ideas are coming fast, nothing beats a format with zero friction — no dialog boxes, no element menus, just typing. Many writers draft in Fountain precisely because a bare text file offers nowhere to procrastinate. Archiving: when a project wraps, a Fountain file is the safest long-term home for it. Formats come and go; text endures.

The middle of the process — production, revisions, collaboration with a cast and crew — tends to happen in dedicated software, because that's where features like revision tracking and page locking live. The beauty of Fountain is that it moves cleanly in and out of those tools. It has become the de facto interchange format of screenwriting: a common tongue between apps, the way Markdown became one for prose. (If you're new to how the rendered output should look, our complete screenplay formatting guide covers the standard elements Fountain compiles into.)

Tools That Speak Fountain

Part of Fountain's promise is that no single app owns it, and the ecosystem reflects that. Highland — co-created by John August — was built around Fountain from the start. Slugline and Beat are Fountain-native editors with devoted followings. Even heavyweight production tools like Final Draft and Fade In can import Fountain files, and command-line converters exist for turning .fountain into PDF or Final Draft's .fdx format.

Quillit supports Fountain export on its free tier, alongside PDF — so a script you write in a modern editor with live formatting is never locked in. That's worth checking in any tool you evaluate, honestly, whether or not it's ours: can I leave with my work in an open format? An export path to Fountain is the difference between renting your screenplay and owning it. It's also a criterion we'd apply when weighing any of the alternatives to Final Draft.

Should You Write in Fountain?

Try this experiment: open the plainest text editor on your computer and type a scene from memory using nothing but the conventions above. Most writers find two things happen. First, it works — the scene is readable as a screenplay immediately. Second, the absence of software formality changes how drafting feels. It becomes closer to writing a letter than operating machinery.

You don't have to choose between plain text and a real editor, though. A good modern tool gives you both: type naturally, see industry-standard formatting render live, and keep Fountain as your escape hatch. However you work, the deeper lesson of Fountain stands. Your screenplay is not software. It's text — dialogue, action, and structure — and it deserves to outlive every app you'll ever write it in.