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Obsidian Fountain Editor
🚧 Beta Docs — Information may be outdated or lacking. 🚧

🙋‍♂️ Opting Out to Markdown

When a file is marked for Fountain formatting, the whole file is treated as Fountain, by default. For those who like to annotate in their screenplay, there are a variety of escape-hatch methods to do so.

Fountain Synopsis

Fountain’s Synopses is treated by the processor as a valid line of Fountain, but it does not receiving any additional styling (notably, the custom screenplay font isn’t applied).

Synopsis.fountain.md
= Any line that starts with a `=` symbol is treated as a **Fountain Synopsis**.

Technically, it still applies the cm-fountain-synopsis class name, but Fountain Synopsis and Headings are excluded from additional Fountain styling.

demo of using synopsis

  • Pros:
    • Valid Fountain syntax, so you don’t need any pre-processing to strip it out or whatever.
  • Cons:
    • Only applied per-line, it gets tiring to type out the = prefix on every line. Besides, I don’t think multi-line synopsis is the intended use-case for Fountain.
    • Not supported by Obsidian

Obsidian’s Block/quotes syntax conflicts with Fountain’s Forced Transition syntax — read details at Syntax Conflicts.

However, if you know how to strip out all the blockquotes before rendering your PDF, and by enabling an optional setting, you can use liberally blockquotes everywhere!

Blockquote.fountain.md
> Usually, this is Fountain's forced Transition.


> But if there is a non-empty line before or after...
> Then it is treated like a regular Obsidian-markdown blockquote!


> But you can opt-out entirely with the setting: "Prefer Obsidian's blockquote over Fountain's forced Transition"


> [!important]
> You can even use callouts!

This is the plugin author’s recommended way to annotate screenplays with markdown.

demo of using blockquote

  • Pros
    • Natively supported by Obsidian
    • Can be converted into Obsidian Callouts!
    • No rendering issues, CLEAN!
    • Spans across multiple lines
  • Cons
    • Requires a step of processing to strip out blockquotes before PDF render
    • Requires an indented > prefix, not flush with document body. However…
      • Some people sees this clearly defined annotation area, as a win
      • Native Obsidian support provides that auto-formatting and commands

Obsidian Comments

Text enclosed within %% Obsidian comment symbols %% don’t receive Fountain formatting, so they look just like regular markdown!

This is no longer the recommended way to annotate screenplay, since we found an issue where a large comment area would break the plugin’s Fountain formatting. It is still however a usable way to opt-out into markdown.

Obsidian Comments.fountain.md
%%
Text inside here will be regular markdown!
%%
  • Pros
    • Natively supported in Obsidian!
    • Annotations in main body, without additional indentation or markup. Makes it super simple to add new lines.
    • Spans across multiple liness
  • Cons
    • Aforementioned issue where large comment blocks causes the plugin’s formatting to go whack