FDX vs Fountain: Which Screenplay Format Should You Use?

The short answer

Use FDX when the script has to be exact: when it is going to production, when scene numbers and revision colours matter, when it has to survive a round trip through Final Draft, or when dual dialogue needs to stay side by side.

Use Fountain when the script has to be readable, portable and versionable: drafting, archiving, diffing, sending a scene in an email, writing on a phone in a plain text app, or keeping a copy that will still open in twenty years.

The disagreement you will find online is really about which of those two jobs is "the" job. It is not a format war — it is a question of what the file is for this week. A writer drafting act two and a first assistant director breaking down a shooting script have almost nothing in common, and they should not be using the same file.

What FDX actually is

FDX is Final Draft's file format, and it is XML. It replaced the older binary .fdr format with Final Draft 8, and it is plain UTF-8 text: rename a copy to .xml and any text editor will open it.

What matters is that FDX stores meaning. Each paragraph carries a type, and the document carries the layout settings that turn those types into a page:

<Paragraph Type="Scene Heading" Number="7">INT. FERRY TERMINAL - NIGHT</Paragraph>
<Paragraph Type="Action">Rain hammers the tin roof.</Paragraph>
<Paragraph Type="Character">MARCUS</Paragraph>
<Paragraph Type="Dialogue">You said the doors would be open.</Paragraph>

Because of that structure, FDX can hold things plain text has no way to express: a scene number attached to a scene rather than typed in a margin, per-paragraph revision metadata recording which lines changed in which colour, a dual-dialogue marker that keeps two speeches side by side, letter pages such as 24A that exist without renumbering the script, and the exact margin and font settings that determine line breaks. It also stores the title page and the document's template, which is where one practical hazard comes from: an FDX written on a non-standard template carries that template with it, so its page count is not the standard page count.

The honest limitation is ownership. Final Draft does not publish a formal specification for FDX. The XML is legible enough that compatible apps have implemented it by observation, but fidelity varies: a third-party tool may quietly drop revision metadata, ignore scene numbers, or repaginate the file. If you move a production draft between apps, check what survived — do not assume.

What Fountain actually is

Fountain is a plain text screenplay format, designed by screenwriter John August and developer Nima Yousefi, with its syntax published openly for anyone to implement. A Fountain file is a .fountain file — or just a .txt file — that looks like this:

Title: THE LAST FERRY
Credit: Written by
Author: A. Writer
Contact:
[email protected]

INT. FERRY TERMINAL - NIGHT

Rain hammers the tin roof. MARCUS watches the last boat pull out.

MARCUS
You said the doors would be open.

(into phone)
Hello?

> CUT TO:

# ACT TWO
= Marcus has to cross the water another way.

Every element is a convention rather than a tag, which is why the file reads as a script even before any app has rendered it:

Title:, Credit:, Author:, Contact:

The title page, as key-value pairs at the top of the file. It must be the first block in the document.

A line starting with INT., EXT., EST. or I/E

A scene heading. Force a heading that does not begin that way with a leading period: .MONTAGE OF PHONE SCREENS.

An all-caps line after a blank line

A character cue, with the dialogue beneath it. Force one with @ when a name is not all caps: @McCONAUGHEY.

(whispering) directly under a cue

A parenthetical.

A line ending in TO:

A transition, uppercased and set to the right margin. Force one with a leading >.

^ at the end of a cue

Dual dialogue — this cue sits alongside the previous one.

> THE END <

Centred text.

===

A hard page break.

#7# at the end of a heading

A scene number.

# and = at the start of a line

A section and a synopsis. Both are outline material and are stripped from the rendered script.

!MARCUS or [[a note]]

A forced action line, and a note. Notes are also stripped from the output.

What Fountain does not have is layout. There is no line count, no page size and no margin in the file, because the renderer decides all of that. That is the format's greatest strength — the same file prints from any app — and its sharpest limitation, which is that two Fountain apps can produce two different page counts from the same script.

Side-by-side comparison

When each one wins

Fountain wins when the file is about the writing

• Version control. Fountain diffs line by line. You can see exactly what changed between draft 3 and draft 4, in plain text, and two branches merge without a fight. FDX diffs are XML noise.
• Portability. Email the script in the body of a message. Paste a scene into a note. Keep it in Dropbox or iCloud without a proprietary container. Open it on a device that has no screenwriting app at all.
• Longevity. Plain text has no reader to be discontinued. An FDX needs software that still understands it; a Fountain file needs nothing but eyes.
• Size and speed. A feature is tens of kilobytes. It syncs instantly and never corrupts into an unopenable binary.
• Drafting on a phone. If you write in a plain text app, Fountain gives you screenplay structure without locking you to a specific product.

FDX wins when the file is about the document

• Production. Scene numbers that lock, revision colours, A-pages, OMITTED scenes. Fountain has no mechanism for any of it, and a production draft without them is not usable by a first assistant director.
• Exact pagination. The page count is fixed by the document, not by the app you happen to open it in. When the schedule is built on page counts, that determinism is the point.
• Dual dialogue. Handled properly rather than depending on each app's support for the caret convention.
• Final Draft round trips. If your collaborators, your reps or the production office are in Final Draft, FDX is the format that arrives intact.
• Rich metadata. Revision history per paragraph, notes, cast lists, title page formatting, and the layout settings themselves.

The territory that is genuinely contested is which format makes the better archive. The case for Fountain is that it will be readable in any text editor indefinitely and diffable forever. The case for FDX is that a screenplay is not just words — it is a paginated document, and a Fountain file only becomes a script once a renderer touches it, which means your archive is dependent on a renderer continuing to exist. Dominant practice among working writers is less philosophical: FDX is the working master, and a Fountain copy is cheap insurance. Keep both and the argument stops mattering.

Keeping both: moving between the formats

You do not have to choose. The two converters that matter are both free and run in the browser:

• FDX to Fountain Converter — turn a Final Draft file into a plain text script you can archive, diff or paste.
• Fountain to FDX / PDF Converter — turn Fountain into Final Draft XML for production, or a printable PDF for reading.

A workflow that holds up in practice: draft in whichever format you enjoy writing in, keep the master file in that format, and export the other one at every milestone — new draft number, sent to a reader, picture lock. Name the exports so the pairing is obvious: Title_v4.fdx and Title_v4.fountain.

One warning matters more than the rest. Do not route a production draft through Fountain as a conversion step. Colours, locked scene numbers, letter pages and revision metadata have no representation in plain text, so a round trip quietly discards them, and the loss is invisible until someone asks which lines changed on the blue pages.

The same applies in reverse on the geometry: converting Fountain to FDX means the app applies a template, so the page count you get depends on the settings of the tool doing the conversion. If a page count is load-bearing — a contest's page limit, a runtime target, a shooting schedule — check it in the file you are actually sending.

Frequently asked questions

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