JumpCut

JumpCut is a Rust utility designed to convert Fountain screenwriting markup format and Final Draft documents (FDX) into Fountain, FDX, HTML, JSON, text, and PDF formats.

It was created by a working screenwriter to match the industry-standard conventions for Hollywood screenplays (lines per page, margins, dialogue splits, etc).

JumpCut can be used as a command-line utility, a Rust library, or as a WASM package.

Installation

If you want to use JumpCut as a command-line utility, you can install it via Cargo.

cargo install jumpcut

To use JumpCut as a library, you can specify the following in your Cargo.toml so that the command-line features are not added to your project:

jumpcut = { version = "1.0.0", default-features = false, features = ["lib-only"] }

Usage

Once installed, you can pass JumpCut a text file and it will parse it and output it as FDX, HTML, JSON, text, or PDF. The full options from the help text are listed below.

A tool for converting Fountain and Final Draft screenplay documents into Fountain, FDX, HTML, JSON, text, and optional PDF formats.

Usage: jumpcut [OPTIONS] <INPUT> [OUTPUT]

Arguments:
  <INPUT>   Input file, pass a dash ("-") to receive stdin
  [OUTPUT]  Output file in the legacy positional form

Options:
  -f, --format <FORMAT>
          Formats (Fountain, FDX, HTML, JSON, text, PDF)
      --paginate
          Render text output with pagination
      --exact-wraps
          Render HTML output with exact Final Draft-style wraps
      --embed-courier-prime
          Embed bundled Courier Prime, or the family from --font-dir, directly into HTML CSS
      --line-numbers
          Show line numbers in text output
      --render-profile <RENDER_PROFILE>
          Override the layout/render profile [possible values: industry, balanced]
      --no-continueds
          Suppress (CONT'D)/(MORE) markers in render outputs
      --no-title-page
          Suppress title-page output for HTML and PDF renders
      --font-dir <DIR>
          Provide custom font family containing regular.ttf, bold.ttf, italic.ttf, and bold-italic.ttf (Only for PDF/HTML; must be used with --embed-courier-prime)
  -o, --output <FILE>
          Output file
  -w, --write
          Auto-derive an output file path from the input stem and format
  -m, --metadata [<FILE>]
          Optional Fountain file to merge as metadata. Defaults to "metadata.fountain" if flag is present without a value
  -h, --help
          Print help
  -V, --version
          Print version

Examples:

jumpcut script.fountain script.fdx

# Explicit output flag
jumpcut script.fountain -o script.fdx

# Auto-derive the output path from the input
jumpcut script.fountain -w -f pdf   # writes script.pdf in same directory

PDF bookmarks

PDF output includes a document outline built from screenplay scene headings.

Custom PDF and HTML fonts

By default, PDF output uses an embedded Courier Prime family. To use a custom family (for example, one that covers Cyrillic characters) pass --font-dir with a directory containing all four TrueType faces.

my-fonts/
├── regular.ttf
├── bold.ttf
├── italic.ttf
└── bold-italic.ttf

The following Courier Prime-style aliases are also accepted, one per role:

courier-prime.ttf
courier-prime-bold.ttf
courier-prime-italic.ttf
courier-prime-bold-italic.ttf

Only TrueType-outline .ttf files are supported.

For HTML output, combine --font-dir with --embed-courier-prime; the custom faces are embedded as data: URLs in place of the bundled Courier Prime files.

jumpcut screenplay.fountain --format pdf --output screenplay.pdf --font-dir ./my-fonts
jumpcut screenplay.fountain --format html --output screenplay.html --embed-courier-prime --font-dir ./my-fonts

Library Usage

To use JumpCut within a Rust program, look at main.rs for an example of calling the library, but the basics are...

let mut screenplay: Screenplay = parse(&content); // content is a String of fountain text
let output_fdx: String = screenplay.to_final_draft();
let output_html: String = screenplay.to_html();

Formatting and Metadata

You can customize JumpCut's output.

There are two built-in profiles that act like presets. They bundle together different pagination and output settings:

• industry: the default. This aims for the kind of screenplay pagination and continuation behavior used by major industry tools (like Final Draft).
• balanced: a more opinionated profile that aims for cleaner-looking page breaks, dash wrapping, and (MORE) / (CONT'D) choices. NOTE: This profile is subject to change based on the whims and opinions of the software's author.

You can set these presets (called render-profiles by the app) and other frequent customizations with CLI flags like --render-profile, --no-continueds, and --no-title-page

More specific formatting, margin, and pagination tweaks can be set in a fmt string in the metadata section at the top of a Fountain document.

JumpCut also supports per-element layout overrides (aka "cheats"). These modify an individual paragraph to change the margins or spacing, which can be useful when trying to pull up a line and fit more on a page. In Fountain, those can be written as modifier notes like [[ .lift-1 ]] and [[ .widen-2 ]]. These paragraph-level spacing / width tweaks are preserved during FDX import and export.

If you want the full reference for fmt, profile overrides, and --metadata / -m, see docs/formatting-and-metadata.md.

WASM

JumpCut also ships an in-repo wasm wrapper crate at jumpcut-wasm, so that JumpCut can be used in websites.

For the wasm wrapper API, Cargo feature model, package-generation workflow, and internal size/report tooling, see docs/wasm.md.

The default wasm PDF renderer uses lossless stream compression without font subsetting to keep the downloaded module smaller. Native builds subset fonts by default; wasm consumers can opt into the same smaller generated PDFs with the pdf-font-subsetting feature. The measured bundle and PDF size tradeoffs are documented in docs/wasm.md.

Embedded Courier Prime HTML export is documented in docs/html-embedded-fonts.md.

Diagnostics

Pagination diagnostics and PDF parity tooling are documented in docs/diagnostics.md.

Development Plans

I have open-sourced this project in case it can be useful to other developers and screenwriters. But I mostly develop it for my own use on my own projects. Features are added as-needed for my workflow.

License

JumpCut is licensed under the terms of the MIT license.