Scenewriter is a command line program that parses files in Fountain markup language,
and generates PDFs in the standard screenplay format.
It doesn't implement the full Fountain spec yet, and probably has bugs. But it
seems to kinda mostly work, to the limited extent I've tested it so far.
If you just want to download and use it, see the releases. Note that it's still an unfinished / preview release. But for basic scenes, it might already do everything you need. Issues that might be offputting are:
- Full Fountain spec is not yet implemented
- Only really tested with straightforward UTF8 / ASCII encoded documents, probably won't handle weirder encodings well
- Title page is very basic - eg. no contact details
Here's direct links to the Windows, Mac and Linux versions.
Here's the reference version of the John August's Big Fish screenplay from fountain.io, and here's Scenewriter's effort at formatting the same fountain file. It's in the ballpark, but not 100% there yet. For the even less polished HTML output see here.
On my laptop, HTML generation is basically instant (~25ms for Big Fish). Generating the 119 page PDF from the same file takes about 0.4s.
If you'd especially like anything implemented or fixed please raise an issue. See the issues to get a vague idea of the current priorities.
./scenewriter --help
Usage: scenewriter [..options..] input_filename
Options:
--pdf Write PDF file (default)
--html Write HTML file
--stats Show screenplay stats
--a4 A4 page size (default)
-a
--letter US Letter page size
-l
--output filename Choose output filename (default is the input
-o filename filename but with .pdf or .html extension)
--help Show this help
Eg: scenewriter --a4 --pdf -o "My Screenplay final-v23.pdf" my_screenplay.fountain
or just: scenewriter my_screenplay.fountain
(if you're using the Windows version it'll be scenewriter.exe).
If you want to call scenewriter code from python, there are very rudimentary bindings here.