Fountain and Simplicity

[Stu Maschwitz]

When John and I created Fountain, we both agreed on two fundamentals:

• The raw text should look as much like a screenplay as possible.
• The format should be as simple as possible.

Many of our design decisions involved rectifying potential conflicts between these two guidelines. For example, plain text looks more like a screenplay when dialogue is indented and hard-wrapped. But indenting and hard-wrapping make the file more complex to maintain, so we chose to allow indenting, but not require it.

Ultimately, Fountain is for writing as much as anything else. Maybe more than anything else. So we thought very hard about anything that would clutter it up or make it unwieldy. We wanted Fountain to be embraced by all writers, not just nerdy ones.

I mention this now because here on this list, there have been a few suggestions of ways to make Fountain more powerful, but also more complex. I love these discussions, and am delighted they have a home here. But please do know that John and I, while being huge nerds ourselves, will always be considering the bigger picture of Fountain’s adoption by a broad spectrum of writers. In practical terms, this means when we’re evaluating something for inclusion in Fountain, we’ll often prefer the simplest possible version of an idea, and ask that a complex idea strongly justify its intricacy with a whole lot of otherwise-impossible usefulness.

-Stu