Meander is a tiny, single-binary, portable renderer for the production writing markup language Fountain.
Fountain is a Markdown-adjacent plain-text syntax for — originally — writing screenplays and stageplays.
The guiding philosophy behind Fountain is that that screenplays are version controllable, immune to bit-rot and can be written anywhere. The syntax is simple, repeatable and can be learned in an afternoon. It also remains entirely legible in its own right.
In addition to the core Fountain specification, Meander extends the syntax with clever and worthwhile features where possible or idiomatic to do so. Most of these new features are integrated in ways that play nicely with the core Fountain specification, or can simply non-essential quality of life features that may be avoided if compatibility is critical.
The tool is designed to be self-contained and entirely portable, including fonts, which lets you write wherever you like, on whatever platform you like, with any plain-text editor you like. Or, like some of us, on a bunch of them at once. You can install it anywhere, run it anywhere and take it anywhere, by design.
I strongly believe that to build a great tool that wholly supports an open standard, the tool itself must inherit the same values. Meander is licensed under the GPL 3.0, to ensure it remains available, modifiable and endures — just like your Fountain documents.
Gender Analysis
Meander can perform simple analysis of your characters' gender identities, giving you a detailed print-out of how they break down across the whole screenplay and whose voices are heard the most.
The information backing this analysis comes from a custom boneyard comment in the root file of your screenplay.
Multiple names per-character and entirely flexible labels for identities allow for specificity beyond typical tools. With the data command, all of this information is easily exported to other tools or to help build presentations for your pitch deck.
[gender.male]
Ashby | Ashby Santoso | Captain Santoso
Jenks
[gender.female]
Rosemary
Sissix
Kizzy
[gender.<custom>]
Dr. Chef
[gender.ignore]
Market Stall OwnerTemplates
Fountain originally supported screenplays alone, but was quickly expanded to stageplays with the advent of the original Highland, maintained by one of Fountain's creators.
Meander takes this further, supporting basically any production document you can wedge Fountain's syntax into with custom templates1 and shipping with a variety out of the box —
- Screenplays
- Stageplays
- Graphic novel scripts
- Novel manuscripts
- Coming soon! ↩