TL;DR: Click here for an online version of this Fountain Cheat Sheet
Thanks to recent releases of awesome apps like Highland and Slugline, Fountain, the plain text screenwritting syntax, has been getting a lot of attention. As Fountain newcomers are getting up to speed on the syntax, many have been searching for a Fountain cheat sheet for quick reference.
Highland and Slugline both include features that allow you to “just write” without having to think about syntax, but the promise of Fountain is its ability to be used in any application that takes text input. Thus, a quick reference guide may be of some use to recent plain text converts.
A little over a year ago I reproduced the Fountain syntax guide in a Cheaters page. And then I promptly forgot about it. It wasn’t until the release of Highland that I realized why I never used my own cheat sheet; it wasn’t a cheat sheet. It was a complete syntax reference manual; something that’s almost never useful when writing a screenplay.
Highland ships with a beautiful built in Fountain cheat sheet. It’s short, simple and easy to use at a glance. So, naturally, I ported it to Cheaters so I could have it available at all times.[1]
If you’d like to use it, here’s the new Fountain cheat sheet and the previously created CSS file. Toss those files into the Cheaters cheatsheets and css folders, respectively, and add the link to the Cheaters app in the index.html file with the line:
<li data-preserve-html-node="true"><a data-preserve-html-node="true" href="cheatsheets/fountain_h.html">Fountain</a></li>
For more information on customization, head over to the Cheaters page on Brett Terpstra’s site. Happy writing and welcome to Fountain!
- I even included the “Learn More” link to the full Fountain syntax guide, should the need arise. ↩
Update - 09/05/14
The cheat sheats have been updated with a Forcing Elements section to match the Fountain 1.1 spec.