writing

I have a secret identity. When I’m not plonking away at my keyboard, working on sysadmin-y stuff, I like to work on more fanciful projects. I write, I shoot photos, and of late, I’m tiptoeing into video.

As part of that, I’m working on a new narrative short and thought I’d try working on that on my new iPad Pro. Now, I have the industry standard Final Draft installed on my Mac, PC, iPad, and iOS devices. Problem is, it uses Dropbox for syncing scripts, which I don’t use.

Instead, I broke out my trust text editor on the iPad and created a file with a .fountain suffix. Fountain, for those who don’t know, is a markup language specifically for writing scripts and screenplays. You write your script in a plain text editor marked up with Fountain syntax and then use an app like the awesome Marked 2 to convert it into a formatted script or screenplay.

I didn’t expect Textastic to recognize the Fountain markup, but to my surprise, it totally did!

With Textastic open in the main window and the Fountain Reference Guide pulled up in GoodReader in the side window, I’m able to type everything up in Fountain and then output it to a finished script later.

Score one more for iPad productivity.