Screenplay Markdown (SPMD)

A Plain Text Screenplay Syntax Proposal by Stu Maschwitz, inspired by Markdown

February 8, 2012

SPMD is now Fountain! To learn more, please visit the Fountain site.

If you were familiar with SPMD, you’ll notice a few syntax changes in Fountain:

• Scene Headings are now forced by adding a leading period. They now also optionally can be suffixed with Scene Numbers.
• Action now supports creative whitespace. You can add as many blank lines as you like, and you can indent lines with tabs and spaces. This is only true of Action—other elements still ignore leading tabs and spaces, allowing for aesthetic indenting if you like.
• Dual Dialogue is now expressed by adding a carat ^ after the second Character element.
• Transition elements are now anything in all caps that ends in TO:. You force a Transition element by preceding it with a greater-than symbol >.
• The Title Page now uses a key:value syntax.
• Page Breaks are supported.
• There’s a Boneyard for commenting-out blocks of text.