How the editor decides what a line is

Every line of a screenplay is one element: a scene heading, action, a character, a parenthetical, dialogue, a transition, and a few rarer ones. Calmly Script works out which one most lines are without being told, and leaves the rest to you. Knowing where that line falls saves a lot of fixing.

Action is the default

A line that nothing else claims is action. That is what most of a screenplay is, and it is the safe answer: action prints at the full width of the page, as written.

What the editor recognises as you type

Two elements say what they are in their own words, and the editor changes the line the moment they are complete:

• A scene heading that starts with INT., EXT., EST., INT./EXT., INT/EXT, I./E. or I/E. The opener has to be in capitals (or have its full stop straight after it, as in int.), so a sentence that begins with Interior or Establish stays action. See Scene heading.
• A transition: a line in capitals that ends in TO:, such as CUT TO: or DISSOLVE TO:, or one of the fixed phrases a script ends a scene with, with its full stop or colon: FADE OUT., THE END., SMASH CUT:, MATCH CUT. and a few more. A phrase of three words or more, such as FADE TO BLACK, counts without one.

Characters and dialogue are not guessed while you type. A line in capitals could be a name or a shout in the action, and an editor that changed it back and forth as you typed would be fighting you. Instead, Enter↩ starts the line a screenplay expects next: after a character comes dialogue, after dialogue the next character (see Enter and Tab).

When a file is opened, the whole text is read at once, blank lines and all, so a name in capitals with a speech under it is a character again. Text you paste from another program is read the same way. A piece of the screenplay you cut or copy in Calmly Script keeps what each line is when you paste it.

Choosing the element yourself

When a line should be something its words do not say, choose it. There are three ways, and they do the same thing:

• TabTab and Shift+Tab⇧Tab, which step through the elements;
• the Format menu, or the element menu in the footer;
• Ctrl+1⌘1 to Ctrl+6⌘6, one shortcut for each of the six elements a scene is made of.

An element you choose is pinned: it stays what you made it, whatever you then type on the line.

The characters that say it in the file

A pinned line has to stay pinned the next time the file is opened, in Calmly Script or in another Fountain app. So where the words alone would not say what the line is, Calmly Script writes Fountain’s own character in front of it, dimmed on screen:

In the demo above, Ctrl+1⌘1 turns THE LIGHTHOUSE into a heading and a full stop appears in front of it. That is the whole mechanism: nothing about the line is stored anywhere but in its text.

.THE LIGHTHOUSE

The lamp turns, and turns.

You can type these characters yourself, too, and the line follows them. Delete the character and the line goes back to what its words say.

A parenthetical and dialogue have no character of their own: they are what they are because of where they sit, under a character’s name.