Fountain Mode

Fountain Mode is a screenwriting program for GNU Emacs using the Fountain plain text markup format.

For more information about the Fountain format, visit https://fountain.io

Features

• Support for the Fountain 1.1 specification
• Export to PostScript or PDF using troff
• WYSIWYG auto-align elements (display only, does not modify file contents) specific to script format, e.g. screenplay, stageplay or user-defined formats
• Traditional TAB auto-completion writing style
• Highly accurate pagination calculation
• Navigation by section, scene, character name, specified character name, or page
• Integration with outline to fold/cycle visibility of sections, scenes and notes
• Integration with electric-pair-mode to insert emphasis delimiters with single key (i.e. * or _)
• Integration with imenu (sections, scene headings, notes)
• Integration with auto-insert for title page metadata
• Integration with which-function-mode to display live-update of current page and page count in mode-line
• Automatically add/remove character (CONT'D)
• Toggle syntax highlighting of each element
• Toggle visibility of emphasis and syntax markup
• Optionally display scene numbers in margins
• Intelligent insertion of page breaks

Most common features are accessible from the menu. For a full list of functions and key-bindings, type C-h m.

Requirements

• Emacs 24.4
• seq 2.20 (part of Emacs 25 and later)

Exporting

Fountain Mode can export to PostScript or PDF using the troff format as an intermediary. This requires only a troff program on your system, such as GNU roff.

Alternatively you can export using an external command-line program, such as:

• afterwriting (JavaScript)
• Wrap (Go)
• screenplain (Python 3, requires ReportLab for PDF)
• Textplay (Ruby, requires PrinceXML for PDF)

The option fountain-export-command-profiles provides some shell commands to interface with these tools, but you are encouraged to edit or completely replace these to suit your own needs. The format is simple while still allowing for flexibility.

Installation

The latest stable release of Fountain Mode is available via MELPA-stable. First, add MELPA-stable to your package archives:

M-x customize-option RET package-archives RET

Insert an entry named melpa-stable with URL: https://stable.melpa.org/packages/

Refresh the package archive and install:

M-x package-refresh-contents RET
M-x package-install RET fountain-mode RET

If you prefer the latest but perhaps unstable version, do the above using MELPA.

Advanced Installation

Download the latest tagged release, move this file into your load-path and add to your init.el file:

(require 'fountain-mode)

If you wish to contribute to or alter Fountain Mode's code, clone the repository into your load-path and require as above:

git clone https://github.com/rnkn/fountain-mode.git

Bugs and Feature Requests

Use GitHub issues or send me an email (address in the package header). For bugs, please ensure you can reproduce with:

$ emacs -Q -l fountain-mode.el

Donations

Donations are graciously accepted via Github, or Liberapay.