The script

The page is US Letter at industry-standard margins, set in Courier at 12 point. What you see while writing is what comes out of the PDF, including where the pages break.

One line, one element

A screenplay is not free text with formatting applied to it. Every line is one element — a scene heading, a line of action, a character cue — and the element decides the margins, the case and the spacing. You never set an indent by hand, because the indent is not yours to set.

INT. VAULTS — NIGHT

The end of everything. A low, close space, foul air, three walls of bone.

MONTRESOR

The nitre. It grows worse.

(beat)

We will go back.

Scene heading, action, character cue, dialogue, parenthetical. Five elements, five sets of margins, none of them typed.

The elements

Element	Key	What it is
Scene Heading	`Ctrl`+`1`	Where and when. `INT. KITCHEN — DAY`. Uppercased for you, and counted in the scene numbers down the margin.
Action	`Ctrl`+`2`	What happens and what we see, in the present tense. The workhorse.
Character	`Ctrl`+`3`	The cue above a speech. Uppercased, and offered back to you by name as you type it again.
Dialogue	`Ctrl`+`4`	What they say.
Parenthetical	`Ctrl`+`5`	A direction inside a speech, set between dialogue lines: `(quietly)`. Type the brackets yourself; the element sets the margins.
Transition	`Ctrl`+`6`	`CUT TO:`, `DISSOLVE TO:`. Set right.
Shot	`Ctrl`+`7`	`ANGLE ON`, `CLOSE ON`. Use sparingly; it is the director's job more often than yours.
Section	`Ctrl`+`8`	An act, sequence or beat heading. Never printed. Press the shortcut again to step the depth 1 → 2 → 3.
Synopsis	`Ctrl`+`9`	One line saying what the scene or section does. Never printed.
Note	—	A note to yourself, in the middle of the page. Never printed. Reached from the element menu at the foot of the window: there are ten elements and only nine digits, and this is the one that lost.

On a Mac, Cmd everywhere Ctrl is written above.

The three keys

`Enter` — a new line, in the right element

Enter splits the line and gives the new one whatever usually follows. After a character cue you get dialogue. After dialogue you get action — not another speech, because the common case is that somebody has stopped talking. After a scene heading you get action. After an act heading you get a scene heading.

It is right often enough that most writing is Enter and typing, and wrong rarely enough that Tab fixes it when it is.

`Tab` — change what this line is

Tab cycles the current line through the seven printing elements; Shift+Tab cycles back. The caret stays where it was. Structure elements are deliberately left out of the cycle — stepping through nine types to reach Dialogue is worse than the two keystrokes of picking a section.

`Ctrl`+`1`–`9` — go straight there

When you know what you want, name it. This is the same arrangement Final Draft and Celtx use, so the muscle memory carries.

Autocomplete

Two elements offer suggestions as you type. ↑ and ↓ move through the list, Enter or Tab accepts, Esc dismisses it. Ignore it and it gets out of the way.

Character cues

Every name this script has already used. Once a name is complete, the extensions are offered too — (CONT'D), (V.O.), (O.S.), (O.C.) — and a character who has only ever appeared as MAYA (V.O.) is still offered as plain MAYA.

Accepting a suggestion is how a script stays free of MONTRESOR, MONTESSOR and MONTRESSOR — three characters as far as the Cast tab is concerned, and three as far as any production is concerned.

Spell-check runs on the prose and not on the shouting: action and dialogue are checked, in the language your browser is set to, while scene headings, character cues, transitions and shots are left alone. A red underline under every cue would teach you to stop seeing red anywhere, which costs the marks that were worth having.

Scene headings

On an empty heading you are offered the four openings: INT., EXT., INT./EXT., EST. After that it offers locations this script has already visited, so the kitchen is spelt the same way every time.

Type a dash and it switches to times of day, because after the dash that is what you are reaching for. The times this script already uses come first — whatever language they are in — and under them the English defaults: DAY, NIGHT, DAWN, DUSK, CONTINUOUS, LATER, MOMENTS LATER.

Which words count as times is something you tell the app rather than something it works out, and you are asked once per word. See Settings.

Outline marks

Sections, synopses and notes are the writer's scaffolding. They are part of the project and they never reach the printed page. The Options ▾ → Outline marks shows and hides them in the script view. It starts off, so a new project opens on the screenplay rather than on the scaffolding.

With them hidden you see the screenplay as a reader will. With them shown you see what you were thinking. The caret skips over hidden lines rather than landing in them, so writing with marks off never puts you somewhere you cannot see.

Finding and replacing

Ctrl+F opens find over the page; Esc closes it and leaves the caret on the match you were looking at, ready to keep writing. Enter steps forward, Shift+Enter back, and every hit is marked in the page with the current one brighter.

It searches what is on the page, so Outline marks decides whether your sections and synopses are looked at — finding something in a line you cannot see, and jumping to it, would be a worse answer than not finding it. Replace changes the one you are on; All changes every one at once, which is how a location gets renamed across forty scenes. Both are a single undo step.

Options

Options ▾ in the toolbar opens one sheet with two tabs, both saved together.

Title page holds the credits. The fields follow the Fountain convention — credit, author, source, draft date, contact, copyright, notes, revision — and travel with the script when you export Fountain or a bundle.

PDF export holds three settings that are the app's own rather than the format's:

Print a title page. Off, and the PDF starts on page one of the screenplay.
Print scene headings in bold. Neither is standard: plain is the conservative default, bold is a common house style and usual in television and shooting scripts. It is a choice per screenplay rather than a decision made for everybody.
Combine multiple parts into one PDF. Asked here rather than at export time, because the answer belongs to the project: somebody sending a package wants one file every time. The export dialog says which way it will go.

Because these three are not part of Fountain, they do not survive a round trip through a .fountain file. A project bundle keeps them.

What the pages tell you

A dashed rule across the page is where the printed page turns, with the page it turns to named at the left. It comes from the same pagination that makes the PDF, so it is where the break really falls — including when it falls in the middle of a speech, which is the one you want to know about.

It is a rule and not a gap: the editor is one continuous sheet, and the useful thing is knowing where the page turns rather than looking at two inches of white. Outline marks do not move them — sections and synopses are not printed, so they change where a line sits on your screen and not which line the page breaks after.

The number down the right margin is the page. The number down the left is the scene. The status bar at the foot carries pages, scenes and words for the whole script.

Pagination is real, not estimated: the same layout produces the screen, the PDF and the page numbers the Structure tab reports. When it says the midpoint is on page 61, that is the page it will print on.