A structure here is not a separate document. It is a set of headings placed through the screenplay itself, so that the shape you planned and the script you wrote cannot drift apart.
Three depths, nested. The names are the conventional ones, and they are hints rather than rules — sections in this app are generic, and writers legitimately head them TEASER, COLD OPEN or PART TWO.
| Depth | Usually called | Fountain |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Act | # |
| 2 | Sequence | ## |
| 3 | Beat | ### |
Under any heading you can write a synopsis — one line saying what that act or beat is for. Neither headings nor synopses ever print. They are in the file, they export as Fountain sections, and they are invisible to a reader of the screenplay.
# ACT TWO — Confrontation
= The obvious solution fails, and the cost starts rising.
INT. VAULTS — NIGHT
The end of everything. A low, close space, foul air, three walls of bone.
Open the Structure tab and choose a template. Seventeen are offered, in five groups: act structures, beat sheets, short-film shapes, other traditions, and a blank one to build your own.
Just the headings go in, at the top of the script and in order — nothing is written under them. Beside each empty box the template shows what that part is for: ACT ONE reads “Setup. Roughly the first quarter: the world, the want, and the event that ends the status quo.” A reminder, never text in your file. Then you write — fill the box with what your act two is going to do — and move the headings down into the script as the scenes appear.
Nothing you have already written is touched. If the script has scenes in it, they stay exactly where they are and the headings arrive above them.
Once a structure is in place the tab offers Change structure… and Remove instead of the picker. Choosing a second template does not lay it over the first — two interleaved scaffolds are worse than either, and there is no way back out of them.
A change does something different from a first application:
No scene ever moves. The headings arrange themselves around the script; the script is never rearranged to fit the headings.
This is worth using. Trying a finished draft against the Eight Sequence model after outlining it in Three Act tells you something no amount of staring at the page will — and undo covers the whole change in one step, so disagreeing with where it put things costs nothing.
What a change does discard is the synopses you wrote under the old headings, because they belonged to headings that no longer exist. The app says so before doing it, and counts them.
Each heading reports the page it currently falls on, and how many scenes sit under it.
This is the reason the feature exists. A structure without page numbers is something you already carry in your head. One that says the midpoint arrives on page 71 of a 108-page draft is an argument about the draft.
Above the list, the draft is drawn along its own length on two rails: aim above, draft below, and a connector joining each pair. A connector leaning right is a beat that arrived late, one leaning left a beat that came early, and a vertical one is a beat where it was meant to be. Acts are the shaded regions behind.
The scale underneath is marked page by page — every ten pages on a feature, so it stays a ruler rather than a grey band. Each heading is numbered once, and the same number runs down the list below, so the mark and the row name the same thing. Click a number to go to that line.
Headings that share a page share a point, and are labelled as the range they are: 1–6 rather than six numbers on top of each other. On a short script that happens constantly — six beats of a fifteen-beat structure can all open on page one — and it is worth seeing rather than smoothing over.
When the headings came from one of the structures above, each row also says where that structure puts it — p.71 · aim p.55 · +16. That is the beat sheet: not a list of what happens, but the difference between where a beat landed and where the method says it belongs.
The aim is worked out from the length you have actually written, not the length the method assumes. Snyder gives page numbers for a 110-page script; a 92-page comedy is shorter rather than wrong, so its midpoint aims at page 46. And the aim is stated, never scored — a page target is a convention, plenty of good films miss one, and it is not the app's business to mark your homework.
Rename a beat and the aims stay. Add or delete one and they disappear altogether, because the list no longer matches the structure that produced it and every remaining aim would belong to its neighbour. A sheet that reported drift invented by its own bookkeeping would be worse than one that says nothing.
The pages are real, not estimated. The same layout that draws the script on screen and renders the PDF produces these numbers, so a beat reported on page 71 is on page 71 of the file you send out.
Scenes are counted rather than listed. A structure view that listed every scene would be the Cards tab with worse typography, and "ACT TWO — 14 scenes" is the number you are actually checking.
Take Blank — one act and nothing else — then add headings from the foot of the Structure tab and rename them. A heading added there is a heading in the script, identical in every way to one a template put there.
You can also work the other way and never open this tab: press Ctrl+8 anywhere in the script to make the current line a section heading, and press it again to step the depth 1 → 2 → 3.