We’re keeping Nima Yousefi busy working on Highland, but he’s found time to push a major update to Fountain, the open-source format and code library that makes the magic possible:
It came to our attention that on iOS devices the parser’s performance was less than stellar. In fact, it was pretty terrible.
Long story short, now there’s FastFountainParser. It’s a traditional line-by-line parser and roughly ten times faster than the old one. So, that’s a win.
What this means for screenwriters: Fountain-based screenwriting apps for the Mac and iPad will be much, much faster.
Also included in the package: our libraries for HTML export and pagination.
It splits large dialogue blocks up across pages, adding the appropriate MORE and CONT’D, and is smart enough not to split in the middle of a sentence.
Fountain is designed to be completely agnostic — you can write Fountain in almost any app that generates text. That said, specialized apps can do amazing things, and we want developers to have a consistent base to jump off from.
I’ve had the chance to try out some of the forthcoming apps. You’re going to love them.