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