What is Fountain?

The idea

Fountain is a set of conventions for writing a screenplay in a plain text file. Type a line beginning with INT. and any Fountain-aware app knows it is a scene heading. Type a name in caps on its own line and it knows a character is speaking. No styling, no proprietary file, no software required to read it.

It was created by John August, Nima Yousefi, Stu Maschwitz, and Jonathan Poritsky, and it is an open specification rather than a product.

What it looks like

A complete Fountain scene, written in any text editor:

INT. HOSPITAL CORRIDOR - NIGHT

A light stutters. MAYA (30s, scrubs) walks fast.

MAYA
Room four. Right now.

OKONKWO (O.S.)
There is no room four.

CUT TO:

That is the entire syntax on display. Blank lines separate elements. Uppercase before dialogue means a character. A line ending in a colon and right-aligned by convention is a transition. Almost everything else is inferred.

A few extras

• Title page — key/value pairs at the top: Title:, Credit:, Author:, Draft date:
• Forced elements — prefix a line with @ to force a character cue, or . to force a scene heading, when the guess would be wrong
• Notes — [[like this]], ignored when the script is rendered
• Boneyard — text between /* and */ is cut but kept in the file
• Sections and synopses — # and = for outlining that never appears in the script

Why bother

Because it will still open. A .fdx file depends on a company continuing to exist and continuing to support that format. A Fountain file is a text file. It opens in Notes, in TextEdit, in anything, on any machine, in twenty years.

It also means your script works with tools that have nothing to do with screenwriting — version control, diff tools, a plain search. And moving between apps stops being a migration.

The trade-off is that Fountain carries structure, not presentation. Revision marks, locked pages, and production numbering live outside it. Draft in Fountain, deliver in PDF or .fdx, and you get both.