Fountain, Final Draft and PDF: How to Leave Any Screenwriting App With Your Work
Find the door before you need it
The best time to learn how to get your script out of an app is the day you install it. The worst time is the week the subscription lapses, the company is acquired, or the export button moves behind a higher tier.
The good news is that every screenwriting app made in the last twenty years shares a small set of exchange formats. Learn three of them and you can leave anything.
The three formats
Fountain (.fountain, .txt)
Plain text with a few conventions. A line in capitals that starts with INT. or EXT. is a scene heading. A capitalised name on its own line is a character cue, and the lines under it are dialogue. Parentheticals sit in parentheses. That is most of it.
Keeps: every element type, the words, bold, italic and underline, notes, dual dialogue, the title page.
Loses: nothing that matters to the writing. Fountain has no concept of a page, so page breaks and page counts are recalculated by whatever opens it.
Why it is the safe choice: a human can read it with no software at all. A Fountain file from 2012 opens today, and one from today will open in 2040. It also compares cleanly line by line, so version control works.
Final Draft (.fdx)
An XML file that Final Draft reads and writes, and that nearly every other app imports and exports because so many production offices standardised on it.
Keeps: scene headings, action, dialogue, dual dialogue, transitions, scene numbers, and the text marks. Usually the title page too.
Loses: app-specific extras. Your outline, your character notes, your comments, anything that lives outside the screenplay proper. Paragraph spacing and indent overrides sometimes arrive differently.
When to use it: whenever the person on the other end writes in Final Draft, or when you are moving to a new app and want the formatting carried across rather than re-inferred.
The page as it prints. Universal, exact, and read-only by design.
Keeps: the appearance of every page.
Loses: structure. A PDF does not know that a line is dialogue, only that it is text at a given position. Turning it back into an editable script means the importer has to work that out from the layout.
When to use it: to send a draft to be read. Not as your only copy. If a PDF is the only version you have, the script can still be recovered, but budget an afternoon to check the result.
Leaving, step by step
- Export to FDX first, if the app offers it. It carries the most formatting.
- Export to Fountain or plain text as well. It is your insurance. It cannot rot.
- Export a PDF of the current draft. It is the proof of what the script looked like on the day you left.
- Collect everything that is not the screenplay. Outlines, beat sheets, character bibles and notes usually do not export with the script. Copy them into text files by hand if you must.
- Open the exports in the new app before you cancel anything. Check a dual dialogue block, a page break inside a long speech, a scene number, and the title page.
Do this once a year even if you are staying. A backup you have never restored is a hope, not a backup.
What EpicDraft opens, and what it writes
EpicDraft was built on the assumption that you arrive from somewhere and might leave for somewhere else.
It opens .fountain and .txt, .fdx, and .pdf. A PDF with a real text layer is converted into an editable script. A scanned PDF, or photographed pages, goes through OCR one page at a time, with a progress view and a cancel button. See the PDF guide.
It writes PDF, with the page in the editor matching the page in the file, scene numbers included. It also writes Final Draft .fdx, which we label experimental and mean it. Scene headings, dialogue, dual dialogue, transitions, scene numbers and text marks come through. Final Draft's own paragraph layout attributes, revision tracking and cast lists do not. Open the result in Final Draft before a deadline. See the FDX guide.
Its own format is .sp, plain text built on Fountain. There is no separate Fountain export because you do not need one. Open an .sp file in any text editor and it reads as a Fountain-style screenplay. Saved as .sp.txt, the default, every other program treats it as the text it is. See the Fountain guide.
None of this sits behind a paywall. Free means free to write, export and print, with no watermark.
The principle
An app should earn the next draft, not hold the last one hostage. If you cannot find the door in the app you use today, that tells you something about the app. If you can, use it once, and keep the files.
Then write.
