Story line and treatment

Two pieces of prose, on the first two tabs of the Story view, because they are written together: the story line is the film in a breath, the treatment is the film in a few pages.

Why they are here and not in another app

Every screenplay has a document beside it — the pitch, the outline, the thing you send before you send the script. It usually lives in a word processor, gets out of step with the screenplay within a week, and is the first thing anybody actually reads.

Keeping it in the project means it travels with the screenplay: into the PDF, into the bundle, into the copy you send somebody. There is no fourth application to keep in step.

The story line

A paragraph or two on the Story line tab: who this is about, what they want, and what is in the way. Plain text, deliberately — a logline that needed bold and bullet points would be doing too much.

There is no length limit and no template. Some people write two sentences and some write half a page.

The treatment

On the Treatment tab beside it, the film told in the present tense, at whatever length it takes. This is a plain white page in a typewriter face rather than a formatted document: no toolbars, no font menu, nothing to arrange.

The two are tabs rather than one scrolling page because the story line is four lines and the treatment is four pages: stacked, the first read as a caption on the second, and reaching either meant scrolling past the other.

Three kinds of line, and that is the whole vocabulary:

Line	For
Heading	An act, a part, a section of the telling.
Subheading	A sequence or a scene inside one.
Paragraph	The treatment itself.

Within a paragraph you can set bold, italic and underline with the usual Ctrl+B, Ctrl+I and Ctrl+U. The emphasis survives into the PDF and into the Markdown the bundle writes.

The word count at the foot counts the treatment, not the screenplay. A treatment is measured in pages a reader will sit through, and the number is there to be watched.

Both are spell-checked, in the language your browser is set to rather than in English — a treatment written in Portuguese is checked against Portuguese.

Where they end up

PDF. The Export dialog offers Story as one part — the story line and the treatment together, in that order, on the same pages. They are one piece of writing, and a page turn between them would make them look like two documents that happen to be stapled.
Bundle. The story line becomes storyline.txt, the treatment becomes treatment.md — ordinary Markdown, readable in anything.
Fountain. Neither travels. A .fountain file is a screenplay and nothing else, and that is the point of the format. Export a bundle when you want everything.