Importing

Throughline reads five kinds of file: Fountain, Final Draft (.fdx), PDF, Plain Text, and its own .thrl.

Opening a Throughline project

Pick a .thrl file and Throughline shows you a preview first: export date, and counts for Characters, Settings, Beats, Structures, Sparks, and anything sitting in the recycling bin. If the file was made by a newer version of the app than the one you’re running, you’ll see a warning at this step too.

Importing a screenplay as a new project

Fountain, Final Draft, PDF, and plain text files come in as brand-new projects, not merged into an existing one. 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

.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

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

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.