Fountain

Fountain is a markdown format which enables an author to write in a plain text editor (like Emacs or Kate, and to render a properly formatted screenplay later.

Strengths [Weaknesses]

Convenient

With no special software required, you can write screenplays anywhere and on anything without worrying about having to re-format it later.

Easy

Aside from some simple rules to follow while writing, there's nothing to learn. Write within Fountain's simple style guidelines, and let something else worry about the formatting.

Featureless

Writing in Fountain makes the writing process about the words, not about character name databases, scene breakdowns, storyboards, or any other process that should happen after the writing has been done. This is one step up from a typewriter.

Open

Writing in plain text without any formatting renders a file that is as open and cross-platform as possible. Never worry about getting locked out of your document again.

Weaknesses [Strengths]

Featureless

Fountain's simplicity means that there is no name or slug database, no management of scene numbers, no auto-complete, no tabbed-completion, and most importantly no indication of how long your screenplay will be once properly formatted.

Unstructured

Since it uses markdown, writing Fountain documents renders completely unstructured documents. This sacrifices, in the name of formatless text, many of the advantages of markup; for instance, there is no easy way to quickly pull all character names or a set listing from a Fountain document without using regular expressions to parse through the text.

Install

Unlike docbook, Fountain is unstructured markdown, so there is no installation process. Instead, you write documents with the fountain style guide in mind, and then use some application that can convert your .fountain to a formatted screenplay.

The easiest application for importing .fountan files is Trelby for graphical interaction, or barefoot for quick formatting from a Unix shell command. There are scripts and interfaces for Emacs, Ruby, and Javascript on http://fountain.io/apps.

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