Fountain screenplay format
Fountain is plain text that reads as a screenplay. There is no markup to learn for the common parts: a line in caps before dialogue is a character, a line starting INT. or EXT. is a scene. The rest is punctuation you can pick up as you need it.
The parts you will use every page
INT. NOODLE STALL - NIGHT
Steam off the pots. JANIDA counts coins onto the counter, one at a time.
JANIDA
(not looking up)
Two more and I stop.
NOI
You said that at four.- Scene heading
- A line beginning INT., EXT., EST. or I/E, with a blank line above it. Force one anywhere by starting the line with a period:
.LATER THAT NIGHT - Action
- Any ordinary line. No mark at all.
- Character
- A line in caps with a blank line above and dialogue below. Force one with
@for a name that is not caps:@McAvoy - Dialogue
- The lines directly under a character.
- Parenthetical
- A dialogue line wrapped in brackets:
(quietly)
The rest of the syntax
> CUT TO:- A transition. A caps line ending in TO: is one too, without the mark.
> THE END <- Centered text.
~ Sang khan, sang khan- A lyric.
JANIDA ^- Dual dialogue. The caret marks the second speaker, and the pair sets side by side.
# Act One- A section, for your own outlining. It stays out of the printed page.
= She finally says it.- A synopsis, also yours only.
===- A hard page break.
Sections and synopses show while you write and disappear from the preview, so an outline can live in the same file as the draft.
The title page
Key and value pairs at the very top, before anything else, become the title page.
Title: The Long Way Home
Credit: written by
Author: Nor Sanavongsay
Draft date: July 2026
Contact: hello@example.comReal pages
The preview breaks your script into pages the way it will print: fifty four lines to a page, Courier at twelve point, the standard margins with the wider one on the binding side. What the page count says is what you will get out of a printer, which is the number anyone reading a screenplay actually cares about.