Fountain screenplay format
A screenplay tells you three things over and over: where you are, what happens, and who says what.
Fountain is a plain-text way of writing screenplays. You type ordinary lines following a few rules, and they’re formatted as a screenplay as you type. Most lines need no symbol, because the screenplay layout was standard long before there was software for it. This guide explains each element and shows how it looks on the page.
The parts you’ll use on almost every page
What you type
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.What you get
Nothing you type above is a formatting instruction. Here’s what each line is:
- Scene heading
- A line starting with INT., EXT., EST., or I/E., with a blank line above it. To put one anywhere else, start the line with a period:
.LATER THAT NIGHT - Action
- Type it as ordinary paragraphs, with a blank line between them. Most of a screenplay is action, so it needs no symbol at all.
- Character
- Type the name in caps on its own line, with a blank line above. The line below it is their dialogue. An all-caps line with a blank line under it stays action, which is what you want when you’re introducing JANIDA in the middle of a paragraph. For mixed case, put an
@in front:@Mae Keo, where the caps would swallow the honorific. - Dialogue
- Type it on the lines under the character’s name. It runs until the next blank line.
- Parenthetical
- Type it in parentheses on its own line inside the dialogue, as in
(quietly). I use one when the line would be read the wrong way without it.
The rest of Fountain
These come up less often.
> CUT TO:- A transition. An ALL CAPS line ending with
TO:does the same thing. > THE END <- Centered text.
~ Sang khan, sang khan- Lyrics.
JANIDA ^- Dual dialogue. A caret after the second character’s name sets both blocks side by side, for two people talking over each other.
# Act One- A section, for holding your outline together while you write. If you write comics as well, a
#means something different over there, where it starts a page. = She finally says it.- A synopsis, another outline note.
===- A hard page break, exactly where you put it.
Sections and synopses stay visible while you write and drop out of the screenplay itself, so the outline can live in the same file as the draft.
The title page
Anything at the top of the file, before the first scene, becomes the title page.
Title: Phi Chasers
Credit: written by
Author: Nor Sanavongsay
Draft date: July 2026
Contact: hello@example.comPages that match the printed script
Pages break at the standard screenplay length, in 12-point Courier, on standard margins with the wider binding margin printed scripts expect. The page count you see is the one you get when you print.
The file it makes: .fountain and .fdx
A screenplay written here is saved as a .fountain file, which is plain text. You can open and edit it in any text editor on any machine, and there’s the script: scene headings, names, dialogue, exactly as printed above.
.fdx is the format some desktop screenwriting software saves in, written in XML. The words are in there, wrapped in markup describing the document, so in a text editor it reads as tags around your lines.
What that means in practice:
- Reading it later. A
.fountainfile opens in anything that opens text, including programs that don’t exist yet. An.fdxfile needs software that parses it. - Tracking changes. Plain text works with version control, so two drafts compare line by line and you can see what moved. XML compares badly, because the markup shifts along with the words.
- Handing it over. Some production workflows ask for
.fdx, and that’s a real reason to have one.
Scripts here are read and written as .fountain. Most screenwriting software imports Fountain, so the file usually opens in other programs too.