Turn your Final Draft file into plain Fountain.

Drop in a .fdx file and download a .fountain file you can open in Highland, Slugline, Beat, WriterDuet, or any text editor you like. It runs inside this page, on your own computer, and your script is never uploaded.

Drop your Final Draft file here

You can also pick a file from your computer.

Final Draft (.fdx). Nothing is uploaded.

What travels, and what stays behind

The screenplay travels whole

Every scene heading, action paragraph, character cue, parenthetical, line of dialogue and transition comes across, along with your title page. Where a line would be read back wrongly, the converter marks it: a scene heading that does not begin with INT or EXT gets a leading dot, a character name carrying a lower case letter gets an at sign, a transition that does not end in TO: gets a greater-than sign. Those marks do not show when the file is read.

Four things stay in the .fdx

Fountain has no revision colours, no locked scene numbers, no script notes and no act breaks, so none of them can follow. That is worth knowing before you leave a production draft behind. Cast lists and act markers are dropped for the same reason: they belong to the Final Draft document rather than to the screenplay.

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Questions about Final Draft and Fountain

I write my own films in Google Docs, so I built the tools I kept wishing existed.

Ask me something
Why would I want Fountain rather than Final Draft?
A .fountain file is plain text. It opens in anything, it reads the same in twenty years, it fits in a git repository, and it does not depend on a company staying in business. Writers who work on several machines, or who want their draft under version control, keep the Fountain copy as the one that lasts.
Will I lose my revision marks?
Yes, and there is no way around it. Revision colours, revised page marks and locked scene numbers live in the Final Draft file and have no equivalent in Fountain. If your script is in production, keep the .fdx as well.
Does the title page survive?
It does. It comes out as the labelled lines Fountain uses at the top of a file, so any Fountain app shows it as a title page again.
Is my screenplay uploaded anywhere?
No. The reading and the writing both happen in this page, on your computer. Nothing is sent, nothing is stored, and there is no account.

The other conversions

Fountain to Final Draft

Your .fountain file, typed paragraph by paragraph into a .fdx.

PDF to Final Draft

A PDF read back into a .fdx you can keep writing in.

PDF to Fountain

A PDF read back into plain Fountain.

Final Draft to Google Docs

Your .fdx in a Doc that already has the right margins.

Fountain to Google Docs

Your .fountain in a Doc that already has the right margins.

The converter itself

Every format in, every format out, on one page.