Fountain¶
Fountain is a plain text markup language for screenwriting. It doesn’t exist for a specific software which makes it perfect as the current default (and only) input and output format for Shane.
Design Decisions¶
Sadly Fountain’s syntax seems to be either ambiguously defined or wrongly interpreted (e.g. Trelby doesn’t precede the scene heading with an empty line if it’s a screenplay’s very first element). That’s why it’s been decided that the first line of a Fountain file is understood to be preceded by empty lines.
Also, while Fountain defines a large list of screenplay elements Shane’s Fountain reader (and writer) only understand a small subset of them due to not supporting a large list of screenplay elements itself. Most elements not known by Shane should be read as actions but the user cannot rely on it. Shane understands:
- Scene Headings
- Actions
- Names
- Parentheticals
- Dialogs