🎯 Why this project?

tl;dr

⚡ Supercharge Fountain with Obsidian, with its design philosophy.

A few years ago, I was on the hunt for an apps for writing screenplays. The industry standard ones were very expensive. I did find a few great ones too, that you may want to consider, that I used for a great many ten thousands of words!

I also came to learn about Fountain, used it, and I never want to write any other way. Its markdown-esque simplicity tickles the software developer inside of me. Its design did lend to some shortcomings, but this project aims to make the most out of Fountain.

Ultimately, we’re not reinventing the wheel—instead, we’re turning square tires into round ones (with the power of hindsight!). I believe (Fountain) screenplay writing works best with these three paradigm enhancements below.

1. ⚛️ Atomic Slices
2. 💕 Hybrid Syntax
3. 🖇️ Linked Notes

1. ⚛️ Atomic Slices

tl;dr

Split your screenplay into individual separate slices, one file each, instead of a singular 120+ pages monolith document!

After 100 pages, I found it unwieldy to go back and forth between page 2 and page 92. I had to scroll all the way up and down 4.5k-lines. Sometimes scenes or sections would be archived, restored, reordered, archived again… it was a lot of 📋 copy pasting and scrolling, and large 💀 dead zones of Fountain boneyards.

But that’s not the fault of these amazing helper tools—that’s just inherent to the nature of the original Fountain spec itself. It came from an era of typewriters and Microsoft Word, where everything was written in 📃 one long-running document. So most Fountain applications just had one huge document-per-project.

Following programming principles, you can and should 🔀 split up your work into multiple smaller atomic parts. That way, each part is decoupled and can exist as its own, allowing you to easily move them around.

The greatest thing is to write as if each slice is its own mini-story, mini-arc. I’ve wanted to share one short sequence with a friend, without sharing the entire story. This helps that too.

You could split them at any level, really. Into 2 Halves. 3 Acts. 4 Quarters. 8 Story Circle Eighths. Per scene. Per sequence. Per chapter. Per arbitrary divisions of varying lengths, with particular thematic thrusts.

This project doesn’t really add anything to improve this. You will still have to use a document-concatenate-inator, like the recommended Obsidian Longform plugin, or some external tool. But Obsidian, by nature, allows and encourages this paradigm.

And, 🚨 catch this—you don’t have to. With this project, it is simpler to write in one long Obsidian note, like regular Fountain. But this is just an alternative that’s opened up for many of us who prefer to write ⚛️ atomically!

For free, you get:

1. 🗄️ Easier archiving: Just exclude (or re-include!) that slice from the compilation!
2. 🔢 Easier reordering: Just swap the positions of two slices!
3. 📥 Easier retrieval: You can find the exact scene you want quicker!

2. 💕 Hybrid Syntax

tl;dr

Write Fountain screenplay and Markdown annotations in the same document, side-by-side—rather than separately!

Fountain is born out of the same dream-waters as Markdown. While there are a few cases of syntax conflicts, I’ve found the syntaxes to be very 💕 complementary.

While the Fountain does have methods for annotations, I’ve seen it only used very sparingly in practice:

• the .fountain screenplay is almost verbatim with the compiled .pdf, meanwhile
• the research resources and scene outlines are in a whole other notetaking application, even on another device!

Again, this comes from an era when one device or one application does one particular job well. We don’t need this divide anymore! Generalist apps like Obsidian do both, excellently.

With this plugin (and no other tool, to my present knowledge), you can write Fountain (your screenplay product) and Markdown (your annotations) side-by-side in the same document. No need for context switching.

3. 🖇️ Linked Notes

tl;dr

Declare and find connections between Fountain/Markdown notes!

As a run-on from the two above points, markdown also allows [[linking]] to other atomic notes. This means you can:

• link to other Fountain notes (other scenes)
• link to other regular notes (your research, references, outlines, etc.)

Here are some interesting use cases:

Use Case	Example Markup
Scene locations	EXT. [[PUNTHA'S HOUSE]] - DAY
Character bios	Big, broad, noble. This is [[MAXIMUS]], the horse.
Objects of interest	...revealing the [[RUBY VAULT KEY]].
Setup / payoffs	%% This calls back earlier when [[Yeng chooses to stay]]. %%
Admonitions	%% Must repeat thrice before [[Act 2]]. %%
Helper references	%% See also: [[Scene 8 Outline and Ideas]]. %%

If using apps like Obsidian, you can use the Backlinks feature to discover incoming connected notes that you may have missed!

4. 🟣 (Bonus) Obsidian is just great

tl;dr

Free, simple, private, configurable, extendable, ecosystem.

These three aforementioned enhancements are more like design principles rather than technical features. They cooouuuld be implemented in other markdown editors besides Obsidian (and feel free to!)…

However, with bit of coding to make hybrid syntax a reality, then Obsidian covers all these three bases, and then some more. Obsidian’s vanilla features already lends itself to these paradigms of atomic slices and linked notes.

On top of everything, 🧩 Obsidian plugins can add anything more you want. Someone can add on a plugin (as I have just done!), if it doesn’t already exist in its 2k+ official plugins catalog!

You actually don’t even need this Obsidian plugin. Fountain was designed for apps that don’t have a WYSIWYG editor, in bare unstyled plaintext. You could implement the paradigms without “Live Preview” formatting. But the main purpose of this plugin is to make your Fountain look pretty :)

Conclusion

And again, these are my personal + advanced + nitpicking reasons for developing this project. If you just want a ☑️ simple, 🌟 excellent & 💸 free app for screenwriting, I hope that you find it here :), if not among related projects!