cinemasetfreeImporting a screenplay
Drop a Fountain, Final Draft .fdx, PDF or .txt file on the Scripts tab. You get a review panel listing every scene, character, location and prop found. Untick anything wrong, then confirm.
What the parser reads
All four formats end up as Fountain internally, so what you get depends on how cleanly the screenplay is formatted rather than which file type it arrived in.
| Format | How it goes |
|---|---|
Fountain .fountain |
Best. It is the native format, so scene headings, cues and action lines are unambiguous. |
Final Draft .fdx |
Very good. Element types are tagged in the file, so nothing has to be guessed. |
| Good for properly formatted screenplays, where indentation identifies elements. A PDF exported from a word processor with non-standard margins will parse worse. | |
Plain text .txt |
Works when the script follows standard screenplay layout. Same caveat as PDF. |
The four review tabs
Each tab shows a count of what’s ticked out of what was found. Nothing is written until you confirm.
Scenes
One per scene heading, with its INT/EXT setting, location, time of day and page count in eighths. Read off the script’s structure, so near-certain.
Characters
Everyone with a dialogue cue, with a line count. Also near-certain, because a cue is a cue.
Locations
Pulled from scene headings. Check for near-duplicates here (“KITCHEN” and “JOHN’S KITCHEN”); merging later is possible but tidier now.
Props
The one guessed list, scored from the action lines, so each row shows a confidence and its evidence. High scorers arrive pre-ticked; the rest are yours to judge.
Prop detection, and teaching it
Props are found by scoring nouns in the action lines: a thing characters hold, open, pull and carry scores far above a thing merely mentioned. Two sliders control the cut, one for what is proposed at all and one for what arrives pre-ticked. Moving either re-scores the list live.
Every production has nouns the heuristic gets wrong in a way only you can settle. Set a rule on a term and it sticks for the whole project: Ignore (“page” is scenery in this script, never propose it) or Alias (“pistol”, “gun” and “revolver” are one object the props master pulls once). Rules are per-project and survive re-imports.
The review panel is where a bad import is cheapest to fix. Once committed, unpicking a wrong character or a duplicated location means Combine and Delete across several tabs, or an Undo Import and a fresh run.