Fountain — write screenplays in obsidian

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I made a plugin for writing screenplays in fountain format inside obsidian. Live formatting as you type, a near-print readonly view, an editable index-card view with drag-and-drop, an outline-style sidebar, PDF export, rehearsal mode, and a few other things.

Why another fountain plugin? https://github.com/Darakah/obsidian-fountain didn’t seem to be a thing anymore when I set up a new vault, and obsidian-fountain-editor — while great — only solves the editing side, and treats fountain notes as obsidian links (which for most people is probably a feature, but for me, with lots of existing scripts that have fountain notes in them, was primarily annoying). So at first I quickly threw together fountain-js and the CSS Bluemoondragon07 wrote in this thread. Then I added more features, eventually got fully nerdsniped into writing my own parser (because fountain-js doesn’t give you source offsets and that’s not a trivial fix), and once I got that far I figured I might as well take over the editor side too.

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Some of what it does:

  • live formatting in the editor as you type

  • index cards with drag-and-drop scene reordering (across files, even)

  • outline-style sidebar with synopses and per-scene todos, all click-to-jump

  • PDF export with configurable paper size and scene heading style

  • rehearsal mode that blacks out a character’s dialogue, so you can actually rehearse from the script

  • margin marks ([[@marker]]) that render in the page margin

  • vault links inside fountain files ([[>target]]), since obsidian’s [[ ]] already collides with fountain note syntax

  • snippets for stashing reusable or experimental content inside the document

Screenshots, GIFs, and the rest of the feature list: GitHub - bgrundmann/obsidian-fountain: Write screenplays in Fountain format inside Obsidian · GitHub

In obsidian, search “Fountain” in community plugins to install.

If you use it, let me know — and if there’s something it should do that it doesn’t, even better. Hopefully it’s useful to more people than just me :wink:

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Oh and I just realised I didn’t answer the is it vibe coded and is it open source questions:

  • yes it is open source
  • I did use Claude a lot. But I spend 10 years of my life earning my living programming and working with other programmers on many non trivial programs. So yeah I do comprehend and very strongly guide what Claude does.
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I do in fact use this - I have been creating some CSS to help alter the look of it. I write comic scripts which are a little different to the scripting that this typically shows - but using CSS, and having it in my storyline new document means that I am able to get pretty good output.

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Fascinating. If you don’t mind would you share a screenshot – curious to learn what changed.

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this is a useful lane. fountain notes as plain files inside the vault is exactly the bit that makes this interesting to me: drafting, outline/index cards, rehearsal, and export can all stay close to the same source.

one workflow question: in rehearsal mode, do you hide non-spoken material like synopsis/notes/comments, or is the goal to show the script mostly as Fountain renders it?

for screenplays/comics/creator scripts, that boundary between source notes and read-aloud/performed text seems to matter a lot.

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Rehearsal mode auto hides synopsis, boneyard and notes.

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nice, that’s the default I was hoping for. hiding synopsis/boneyard/notes keeps Fountain useful as a working source file without turning every production note into read-aloud text.

that separation seems especially important once scripts live next to outlines, revision notes, and rehearsal material in the same vault. thanks for clarifying.