Extract a Pretty Outline from a Fountain Screenplay

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Fountain screenplay in Slugline on the left. Outline-only document in Byword on the right. All powered by nothing but text.

Matthew McCowan, creator of the Shotlists from Fountain tool, is at it again. Responding within hours to my request, he whipped up Outline From Fountain, a utility for creating Markdown-formatted outline documents from a Fountain file containing Sections and Synopses.

The Automator app takes a Fountain file and extracts only the Sections and Synopses, reformatting them into a heirarchical bulleted list in Markdown format. You can then use a Markdown app, such as Byword or the awesome new Marked 2, to view and export your outline with any styling you desire.

Once again, Matthew has generously made his work available to the Fountain community:

• Outline from Fountain.app – A standalone Mac application. Drag your Fountain files onto it, and it creates a new TextEdit document with your outline.
• Shotlist from Fountain.workflow – The Automator workflow, in case you want to customize it.
• outline.pl – The original Perl script.
• The Last Birthday Card.fountain – A sample Fountain file with Sections and Synopses, so you can try this out right away.

We're thrilled to see the Fountain ecosystem expanding with simple but powerful tools like this. Follow us on Twitter and let us know what kind of tools you'd like to see for working with Fountain files!