Bold, italic and underline

A screenplay uses emphasis sparingly: a word stressed in a line of dialogue, a sound in the action, the title of a song. Fountain writes it with the characters you would type in an email.

The letter says *run*.

Nobody **ever** answers.

Sign it _twice_. And ***never*** in pencil.

The underscore always underlines; it never means italic, as it can in other kinds of plain text. The marks can be nested: _an *italic* word inside an underline_.

Writing it in Calmly Script

Type the marks, and the words between them change as you type: the closing * is what turns run italic. The marks themselves stay in the line, dimmed. They are not decoration: they are the formatting. Delete one and the word goes back to plain; add one and it changes again. What you see is exactly what is in the file, and what any other Fountain app will read.

You don’t have to type the marks yourself:

• Ctrl+B⌘B, Ctrl+I⌘I and Ctrl+U⌘U (Format › Bold, Format › Italic, Format › Underline).
• The B, I and U buttons at the foot of the window.

With words selected, they put the marks around the selection, leaving any space at either end outside it. With nothing selected, they type an empty pair and leave the caret between the two halves, ready for the word, as in the demo above. Press the same one again when the word is typed and the caret steps out past the closing marks: the word keeps its emphasis, and what you type next is plain. Pressed with nothing typed between the halves, it takes the empty pair out. On words that already have that emphasis, they take the marks off. On ***both***, Ctrl+B⌘B takes off only the bold and leaves *both*, and Ctrl+I⌘I takes off only the italic.

The buttons at the foot of the window light up for the text under the caret, whether the marks came from a button or from your own keyboard.

When you paste text copied from a word processor or a web page, its bold, italic and underline arrive as these marks.

When an asterisk is just an asterisk

A mark with a space on its inner side does not open or close anything, so arithmetic and lone asterisks stay as they are: 3 * 4 * 5 is plain text. A mark with no partner on the same line is plain text too.

To keep a mark that would pair up, put a backslash in front of it: \* and \_ are a literal asterisk and underscore. The backslash is dimmed on screen and does not print.

The sign on the door reads \*STAFF ONLY\*.

Emphasis never runs from one line to the next: open and close it on the same line, even inside a speech that spans several lines. Press Enter at the end of a word you have just made bold and its marks stay on that line; the next line starts plain.

How it prints

The marks are left off the page; the words print in italic, bold or underlined. The word count counts the words without the marks, too.

Find looks at the text as it is, marks included, so a phrase that has a mark in the middle of it is only found if you type the mark as well.