What is Fountain?

Fountain was created in 2012 by John August (writer of Big Fish, Charlie's Angels) and a small team. The idea was simple: a plain-text format for screenplays that any text editor can read, that produces industry-standard output when rendered, and that has no proprietary lock-in.

A Fountain file is just a .fountain or .txt file with a handful of formatting conventions. You can open one in Notepad, Vim, VS Code, or any editor you already use. To render it as a properly-formatted screenplay, you need a Fountain-aware tool — like Ensemble.

Edit Fountain in Ensemble

To open a Fountain file in Ensemble:

1. Open ensemblewriter.com in any browser.
2. Click the import icon in the left sidebar.
3. Choose Fountain from the format options.
4. Select your .fountain or .txt file.

Your script appears in the editor with industry-standard formatting applied: scene headings, action, character, dialogue, parentheticals, and transitions all detected and rendered correctly. You can edit freely, share with collaborators, and export back to Fountain, PDF, or Ensemble's native JSON.

Fountain Syntax Cheatsheet

The core conventions are intuitive once you've seen them.

Scene heading: a line that starts with INT., EXT., EST., INT./EXT., or I/E. (forced sluglines start with .).

Action: any line of regular text.

Character: an UPPERCASE line followed immediately by a non-blank line. Force a character line with @CHARACTER NAME.

Dialogue: the line(s) of text directly under a character line.

Parenthetical: a dialogue line wrapped in (parentheses).

Transition: an UPPERCASE line ending in TO: (or force one with a leading >).

Bold, italic, underline: Markdown-style: **bold**, *italic*, _underline_.

That's most of it. The full spec lives at fountain.io.

Export Fountain to PDF

Once your script is in Ensemble, export to PDF from the export menu — you'll get an industry-standard PDF with Courier Prime, correct margins, page numbers, and optional title page. The free tier handles PDF export up to 20 pages per project; Pro unlocks unlimited pages.

You can also export back to Fountain at any time, so your source of truth remains the plain-text format if that's your preference.

Round-Tripping with Other Tools

Fountain is the lingua franca of screenwriting tools in 2026. You can write in Ensemble, export to Fountain, open in Highland 2 on someone else's Mac, edit there, export back to Fountain, reopen in Ensemble. No information is lost in the round-trip beyond elements unsupported by one side or the other (e.g., dual dialogue and notes).

Final Draft (.fdx) round-trip is possible via Fountain as an intermediate format. Most modern Final Draft installs can import Fountain directly; older versions may need a third-party converter.

Why Fountain Matters

Fountain is the closest thing screenwriting has to a future-proof archival format. A .fountain file written today will be readable in fifty years — it's plain text. The same cannot be said for .fdx, which depends on Final Draft remaining a product.

If you care about owning your work indefinitely — without being locked into one vendor's software remaining around — Fountain is the format to write in. Tools come and go; plain text persists.

For a broader look at free tools, see our Best Free Screenwriting Software roundup, or the Fountain to PDF guide for the export workflow in detail.