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What is Fountain text?

Fountain is a screenplay written as plain text. Scene headings go in caps, a character’s name sits on its own line above their dialogue, and a blank line separates one element from the next. Any app that reads Fountain, Spell Slate included, turns those conventions into a formatted screenplay.

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What it looks like

Pasted into the editor, that text becomes a scene heading, an action line, two character cues, a parenthetical, and dialogue. The same lines in the script editor, formatted as a scene heading, action, character, parenthetical, and dialogue

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Why plain text

  • A Fountain file opens in any text editor, on any machine, now or in twenty years.
  • It travels between tools. Final Draft, Highland, WriterDuet, and most screenwriting apps read and write it.
  • It is small enough to email and simple enough to keep in version control.

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How Spell Slate uses it

  • The script editor writes Fountain behind the formatted page you see.
  • Imports from Final Draft (.fdx), PDF, and Scrivener are converted to Fountain. See Import a script.
  • Export Fountain in the editor’s Export menu saves a .fountain file for use elsewhere. See Download your script.