Fountain screenplay format

A screenplay tells you three things over and over. Where you are. What happens. Who says what.

Fountain is the agreement that turns those into a formatted script while you type them. Almost nothing gets marked, because screenwriters settled the layout long before anybody wrote software for it. Here’s the whole thing.

Written by Nor Sanavongsay, who writes and publishes comics at Sahtu Press.

Start a screenplay

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

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.

Nothing in the left-hand version is a formatting instruction. Walking through it:

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: Ordinary text. Most of a screenplay is action, so it gets the shape that costs nothing to write.
Character: A line in caps with a blank line above and a line of speech below. 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: Everything under a character cue, until the next blank line.
Parenthetical: A line in brackets 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, and they’re there when the script asks for them.

> 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.com

Pages 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. That extension is a label on a plain text file. Open it in any text editor on any machine and there’s the script: scene headings, names, dialogue, exactly as printed above.

You’ll also come across .fdx, which some desktop screenwriting software saves in. It’s XML: the words are in there, wrapped in markup describing the document. In a text editor it reads as tags around your lines.

What that means in practice:

Reading it later. A .fountain file opens in anything that opens text, including things that don’t exist yet. An .fdx file 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 plain text is usually the way across.