Export a Screenplay to Final Draft (.fdx)

Final Draft is the industry-standard screenwriting app, and its native .fdx format is XML. Export a parsed script to .fdx when a collaborator, a production office, or a contest submission expects Final Draft rather than plain Fountain.

Use FDXRenderer:

from fountain import FountainParser
from fountain.renderers.fdx import FDXRenderer

document = FountainParser().parse_file("screenplay.fountain")

fdx = FDXRenderer().render(document)

with open("screenplay.fdx", "w", encoding="utf-8") as f:
    f.write(fdx)

The output is a <FinalDraft> document with a <Content> section holding one <Paragraph Type="..."> per screenplay element, plus a <TitlePage> section built from the document’s title page metadata:

>>> from fountain import FountainParser
>>> from fountain.renderers.fdx import FDXRenderer
>>> script = """Title: The Coffee Shop Connection
... Author: Jane Doe
...
... INT. COFFEE SHOP - DAY
...
... ALICE
... Come on, inspiration... where are you?"""
>>> document = FountainParser().parse(script)
>>> fdx = FDXRenderer().render(document)
>>> "<FinalDraft" in fdx
True
>>> '<Paragraph Type="Scene Heading"><Text>INT. COFFEE SHOP - DAY</Text></Paragraph>' in fdx
True
>>> '<Paragraph Type="Title"><Text>The Coffee Shop Connection</Text></Paragraph>' in fdx
True

The renderer uses only the standard library’s xml.etree.ElementTree, so FDX export adds no runtime dependency. Because the output is standard XML, any XML tooling can read or transform it. Reach for ElementTree, XPath, or lxml instead of parsing the text by hand.

Element Mapping

Every scene heading, action line, character cue, parenthetical, dialogue line, and transition maps to the matching FDX paragraph type. Centered text and lyrics have no dedicated FDX type, so they map to the nearest match instead: centered text becomes an Action paragraph with Alignment="Center", and lyrics become a Dialogue paragraph. Notes, sections, synopses, and boneyard comments are writer-only tools. The renderer omits them, matching HTMLRenderer and PlainTextRenderer.

Dual dialogue renders as Final Draft expects it: one <Paragraph><DualDialogue> wrapper containing both characters’ cue and dialogue paragraphs, so the two sides stay linked instead of flattening to separate paragraphs.