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Everything Else

My creative work also extends to web development, graphic design, and specialized film-related software.


Software development Cross-platform applications
Sept 2018
Better Fountain

Better Fountain

An extension for Visual Studio Code, which adds full support for writing screenplays in the Fountain syntax. Features include, but are not limited to:

  • Full syntax highlighting
  • Smart autocomplete for recurring characters and scenes
  • Live preview of the formatted screenplay
  • Creation of industry-compliant PDF Files (including bookmarks for scene sections and headers)
  • Full screenplay outline, broken down by sections and scenes
  • "Folding" scenes
  • Approximation of a screenplay's duration
  • Screenplay statistics
A demonstration of the outline and live preview features
Better Fountain can also produce interactive statistics from a screenplay

Origin of the project

In late 2018, I was struggling to find a good solution to write screenplays. Established programs like Final Draft or Fade In can seem clunky and dated, while new online ones (such as Celtx) often have poor formatting support and can go offline from one day to the next (like Amazon storywriter did).
I then discovered the fountain syntax, and the incredible advantages it has. However the only decent fountain editor at the time was Highland 2, only available on macOS. I therefore decided to write an extension to add Fountain support to vscode, a powerful text editor. Better Fountain's user-base has since being steadily growing, with new features and improvements being added regularly.

Looking forward

Visual Studio Code is an amazing editor, and allows development of Better Fountain to be focused on the purely "screenplay" side of things, without needing to spend too much energy on file management, UI, etc... However, the extension has reached a point where desired features cannot be added, because of limitations intrinsic to vscode.

I have therefore started development on a standalone version of Better Fountain, which will be the only cross-platform screenwriting editor of its kind. While it is still too early to predict a release date, here are some design mock-ups of what this software is aiming to look like: