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Fountain · Final Draft (FDX)

Fountain and Final Draft: what survives the move

Bring a script in, keep writing, and hand an FDX back to the office. This is what each element does on the way through — so you can check the one you care about before you move a draft.

Comes across, and goes back

Round-trips

These keep their element on the way in and on the way out. A scene heading is still a scene heading when the office opens the FDX.

  • Scene headingsScene numbers ride along, including inserted ones like 12A.
  • Action
  • Character cuesExtensions like (V.O.) and (CONT'D) stay attached.
  • Dialogue
  • Parentheticals
  • Transitions
  • Centered text
  • LyricsFinal Draft has its own lyric paragraph — a song stays a song.

Arrives as action

Becomes action

Final Draft has a few paragraph types with no direct counterpart. The words come across and stay where you put them — they just read as action.

  • ShotsA camera line inside a scene, not a scene break — so it stays text rather than splitting your scene.
  • GeneralFinal Draft's catch-all paragraph.
  • Cast listsKept as readable text in place.
  • New actKept as readable text in place.

Anything Inkwell does not recognize is kept as action and flagged on the import summary, so a file from an unusual template never silently loses a page.

What does not transfer

Stays behind

The script moves. The production bookkeeping wrapped around it does not — so if you are mid-production on locked pages, keep the office copy as the record of record.

  • Locked pagesFrozen page boundaries and A-page numbering stay in Final Draft. Scene numbers still come across.
  • Revision generationsBlue/Pink/Yellow passes and their change marks are not written into the exported FDX.

Depending on either of these?Tell us before you move a draft

What else makes the trip

Dual dialogue

Two characters speaking at once come in as a pair and go back out as a pair.

Bold, italic, underline

Emphasis converts between Fountain markers and Final Draft styles instead of leaking asterisks into your page.

Script notes

Notes in the margin survive the round trip rather than being flattened into the script body.

Run it on your own file

The free converter opens an .fdx or a Fountain draft in your browser, lays it out as pages, and counts these same rows for that specific file — how many shots became action, whether it carries locked pages. It reads Final Draft rather than writing it; the FDX export is in Plot. Nothing is uploaded.

Open the screenplay converter

Move a draft and see for yourself

Import an FDX or a Fountain file on the free plan and write.

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