Importing
Throughline reads five kinds of file: Fountain, Final Draft (.fdx), PDF, Plain Text, and its own .thrl.
Opening a Throughline project
Section titled “Opening a Throughline project”A .thrl file doesn’t need importing: it is your project. Click Open… on the home screen (Cmd/Ctrl+O), or double-click the file in Finder or Explorer, and Throughline opens the file itself, saving your changes back to it. If the file was last edited in a newer version of Throughline, you’ll see a warning before it opens. See Projects & Files for more.
Importing a screenplay as a new project
Section titled “Importing a screenplay as a new project”Click Import Screenplay on the home screen. Fountain, Final Draft, PDF, and plain text files come in as brand-new projects, not merged into an existing one, and Throughline asks where to save the new project file once the import is done. Because a screenplay is structured, Throughline pulls real data out of it automatically: scene headings become Beats, locations become Setting Cards, and Characters get extracted from dialogue.
German screenplay conventions are recognized too.
Final Draft
Section titled “Final Draft”.fdx files import directly, including scene headings, action, dialogue, parentheticals, transitions, scene numbers, scene summaries, and title page fields.
It isn’t lossless, and Throughline shows you the same list before it imports. What doesn’t come in:
- Script notes and inline notes
- Revision marks and revision colors
- Title page layout, draft date, and copyright
- Scene properties such as page length
- Locked pages, headers, and footers
- Shot and General paragraphs, which are kept as plain action lines
- Any formatting beyond bold, italic, and underline
PDF import uses heuristic detection to make sense of the layout, so results vary more than with a clean Fountain or Final Draft file. Give it a once-over after importing.
What Throughline adds on top
Section titled “What Throughline adds on top”A normal screenplay file carries the script and nothing else. Throughline’s cards hold more: a Want, a Need, and a Flaw on every Character, and a description on every Setting. No screenplay format has a place for any of that, so a fresh import leaves those fields open, ready to take your story deeper than the file it came from.