This is an extension for Visual Studio Code, written in a few hours, which allows you to write screenplays using the fountain syntax quickly and efficiently. (If you're already confused click here)
- Full syntax highlighting (even for stuff like lyrics!)
- Autocompletion for recurring characters and scenes, as well as title page keys.
- Full screenplay outline, broken down by sections and scenes
- "Folding" scenes
- Live preview of the formatted screenplay
- Exporting the screenplay to a PDF File
- Approximation of a screenplay's duration (in the status bar)
- Other cool stuff
- Go straight to writing dialog after a parenthetical by pressing enter, while the cursor is still inside it
- Jump to scenes/sections in the .fountain and live preview when clicking on the outline
Writing with fountain lets you focus on the essential. With the addition of autocomplete and syntax highlighting, you have the ultimate clutter-free ultra-fast solution for writing screenplays. And because it's an extension for vscode, it's free and cross-platform, and you get lots of other cool features like integrated source control.
Just open a .fountain file in Visual Studio Code, and everything should work as expected. You can open the live preview and export to PDF by opening the command palette (Ctrl+Shift+P or F1) and searching for "Fountain".
You can modify various options related to PDF Export in the settings, under "Fountain PDF Export".
And to get an approximate duration of your screenplay, just look at your status bar, in the bottom right corner.
Here are some features I would like to add, but don't really have time to right now, in an approximate order of difficulty/priority:
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Built-in screenplay templates (such as Blake Snyder's beat sheet)
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Folding for sections
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More and smarter auto-complete, for stuff like the times of day in scene headers, transitions, etc...
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Buttons for zooming in and out of the screenplay preview (and also with hammer.js?)
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Some sort of system that would allow the storage of character information alongside the script
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Synchronized scrolling of the live preview with the markup.
I will probably add these features when I have time, but if you're up for the challenge I'm more than happy to accept your pull requests.
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Syntax highlighting works thanks to a modified version of the .tmlanguage file by Jonathan Poritsky for fountain-sublime-text
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The live preview uses the Fountain.js library by Matt Daly, covered by the MIT License
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The Export to PDF feature is provided by Piotr Jamróz's Afterwriting CLI tool, also covered by the MIT License
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The project was built using Microsoft's language server example extension as a boilerplate.
Screenwriting is just about writing text, and Visual Studio Code is a great text editor. You don't need to know anything about programming to use it. Here's what you need to do to get started using BetterFountain:
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Done. Now you can create a file which finishes with .fountain anywhere you want, open it in vscode, and start writing! It's very easy to write a screenplay with fountain, but here's a good place to get you started.