How to Use the Fountain Screenplay Formatter Prompt to Turn a Treatment into a Clean Script

Fountain is plain text with rules. You can write a screenplay in any text editor, and apps like Highland, Slugline, and Fade In turn it into properly formatted pages. The catch is that the parser reads each line literally. A sound effect in capitals becomes a character cue, a scene heading without a blank line above it becomes action, and a character with a lowercase prefix in their name disappears into the paragraph. The Fountain Screenplay Formatter: Turn a Scene Treatment into Clean Fountain Markup with Dual Dialogue, Notes, and Title Page prompt converts your prose into Fountain and then tells you which lines would have parsed wrong.

What the prompt produces

1. A title page block using Fountain keys like Title, Credit, Author, Draft date, and Contact.
2. The script in Fountain, with scene headings, action, character cues, parentheticals, dual dialogue, transitions, centered text, and lyrics.
3. Structure markers, using sections for acts and synopsis lines that most apps hide from the printed page.
4. Your notes and alternates kept safe, as inline notes and boneyard blocks that do not print.
5. A list of parser traps found in your draft and how each was fixed.
6. App notes for the program you use and for export to Final Draft.

How to fill the inputs

Treatment is the scene or sequence you want converted. It can be loose prose. The prompt will not add scenes or lines that are not there; where something is missing, it leaves a note instead of inventing it.

TitlePage lists the title, credit line, author, draft date, and contact. Characters matters more than it looks: give the exact capitalization of every name, especially names with lowercase letters or numbers, because those need a forced cue.

SpecialMoments flags overlapping dialogue, montage, intercut, or song lyrics. WriterNotes holds the thoughts and alternate lines you want to keep without printing. TargetApp tells the prompt where the file will be opened and whether it goes to FDX for a producer.

Reading the example output

The example converts a short laundromat scene between two exes into Fountain. Several fixes are worth learning:

• The dryer alarm was a trap. BZZZT alone on a line in capitals would parse as a character. The prompt forces it to action with an exclamation mark and folds it into a sentence.
• Overlapping lines use dual dialogue. The second character cue gets a caret, so the two speeches sit side by side. Because the treatment did not include the exact words, the prompt marks its lines as placeholders for the writer to confirm.
• A lowercase name gets forced. A character written mcKAY would never parse as a cue, so any line for him needs the at sign.
• The alternate is kept in the boneyard. The idea about a leash is preserved in a comment block that never prints.
• Lyrics use a tilde, so the song line in the car is formatted as lyrics.

Tips for better results

Paste the treatment as written. Do not clean it up first. The prompt is built to keep your story choices and only tighten action lines to what the camera sees.

List every character, even minor ones. Names that only appear in notes still cause trouble later when they get a line.

Open the file and check the preview. Apps differ in how they show sections, synopses, and notes. A quick look at print preview confirms that hidden elements stay hidden.

Check exports before you send them. Notes, boneyard content, and lyrics can behave differently when converted to FDX. Look at the converted file before it goes to a producer.

Mistakes to avoid

• Writing camera directions the writer never asked for.
• Putting a scene heading right under an action line with no blank line.
• Typing sound effects in capitals on their own line.
• Deleting alternates instead of moving them into the boneyard.

Who it is for

This prompt fits screenwriters moving from prose drafts to script pages, writing partners sharing plain text files in version control, script coordinators cleaning up drafts from several writers, and students learning Fountain who want to see why each line is formatted the way it is.

Related PromptDig links

• Prompt: Fountain Screenplay Formatter: Turn a Scene Treatment into Clean Fountain Markup with Dual Dialogue, Notes, and Title Page
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