Fountain Format

Fountain is a plain-text markup format for screenplays: write in any text editor following simple conventions — capitalized sluglines, character names in caps before dialogue — and any Fountain-aware tool renders perfect industry formatting. Think Markdown, for screenplays.

Its virtues are the virtues of plain text. Fountain files are future-proof (no proprietary format lock-in), diffable and version-controllable (a Git history of your drafts, revision by revision), and readable as-is in any editor on any device. Most professional screenwriting apps — Final Draft, Highland, Fade In, Slugline — import and export it, so Fountain functions as the interchange format of screenwriting.

The deeper significance is machine-readability. Because Fountain marks structure explicitly — this line is a slugline, this is dialogue, this is action — software can parse a screenplay into structured data: scene lists, character line counts, location tables, INT/EXT-day/night ratios. Every modern script breakdown, scheduling, and analysis pipeline depends on this parseability, whether the source is Fountain or extracted from PDF.

Our own tooling is built on exactly this foundation: the coverage scorecard parses your script's structure to score craft and budget realism, and table read tooling assigns parsed dialogue to voices. Clean formatting isn't cosmetic — it's what makes your script computable.