Metadata

A Fountain script usually starts with some metadata stating the basic info about the script. These are colon-separated key-value pairs at the start of a file, e.g. ‘key: value’.

Other Fountain-compatible programs may refer to this as “title page” info, but metadata can store information not related to or present on the title page.

Calling auto-insert will guide you through adding the most common Fountain metadata, prompting with likely defaults:

• title is pretty obvious, and will default to base-name of the current buffer.
• credit is not actually your name, but the type of credit given to the author, e.g. ‘written by’ or ‘screenplay by’.
• author is you or your writing team, and defaults to the value of variable user-full-name.
• format will override the value of fountain-default-script-format for the current script. Accepted values are: ‘screenplay’, ‘teleplay’, ‘stageplay’.
• date defaults to the current date in your locale’s “preferred” format.
• source, for if you’re writing an adaptation.
• contact is useful if the writer wants readers to ever get in touch to make the film/play!

All metadata keys can take either a single line of input following the colon, or a newline followed multiple lines indented with whitespace:

author:
    Mary Maryland
    and
    Alan Smithee

Metadata keys are case-insensitive, e.g. Title is the same as title.