Migrating from Final Draft

Final Draft is the industry default, and Throughline isn’t trying to replace it at the production end. Throughline is aimed at the part before that, where you’re still working out what the story is.

Bringing a script in

Throughline reads .fdx directly. Import the Final Draft file itself; there’s no Fountain export step in between. Scene headings become Beats, locations become Setting Cards, and Characters get pulled from your dialogue automatically.

It isn’t lossless. Script notes, revision marks, title page layout, and locked pages don’t survive the trip, and Throughline lists exactly what it will and won’t carry before you confirm. See Importing for the full list. We recommend starting your project in Throughline, so you can focus on your story, and then letting others handle Final Draft once a production team is involved.

Going back out

Deliver a Screenplay PDF when you’re production-ready, or export Fountain and bring it into Final Draft to finish there. There’s no .fdx export; on the way out, the industry-standard and app-agnostic Fountain is the bridge.

The tradeoff

Final Draft’s formatting is the reference implementation, and if you’re delivering into a pipeline that expects .fdx, that’s a real, practical advantage. What Throughline adds is the part before the script exists: Beat Cards you can cast and reorder, an emotional Arc for every plotline, and a map of how your cast’s relationships change scene to scene, plus a full screenplay editor to write the draft in once you know what it is.

See the full comparison for a feature-by-feature breakdown.