Formatting & Elements
Screenplay mode formats as you type in the Write Workspace.
The six elements
Section titled “The six elements”Scene Headings are treated with extra care in Throughline. You don’t type them on your page directly; they’re created intelligently based on Settings attached to your Beat in the toolbar at the top of the editor.
Action lines, Characters, Dialogues, Parentheticals and Transitions are exactly how you know them from other software. Tab cycles between them at your cursor, so you’re never reaching for a menu mid-sentence. Typing a character’s name automatically attaches that Character’s card to your Beat, or asks if you’d like to create a new one.
Scene headings
Section titled “Scene headings”Built in the toolbar from three pieces: INT/EXT, a location, and a time of day.
Character cues
Section titled “Character cues”Type a name and Throughline autocompletes it from your project’s cast. (V.O.) and (O.S.) cues stay attached to whichever Character they belong to, so a voiceover line reads correctly wherever it shows up.
(MORE) and (CONT'D) are automatic. A dialogue block that runs across a page break gets them without you touching a thing.
Dual dialogue
Section titled “Dual dialogue”Two people talking over each other get the classic two-column layout. Toggle it from the toolbar on a dialogue block and that speech prints beside the one before it.
It round-trips through Fountain, which marks dual dialogue with a ^, and it renders in PDF export the way it looks on screen.
Numbering
Section titled “Numbering”Scenes and dialogue lines can both auto-number. A new insertion between existing numbers gets a letter suffix: scene 42 gains a scene 42A rather than renumbering everything after it. You can also clear numbering entirely if you’d rather work without it.
Only the active version of a Beat participates in numbering; see Scene Versions for what that means.
Round-tripping through Fountain
Section titled “Round-tripping through Fountain”Fountain export carries your scene structure and dialogue faithfully, but it’s plain text: no dialogue numbers, and no room for the fields only Throughline has, like a Character’s Want, Need, and Flaw or a Setting’s description. Those live in your project and travel in .thrl exports. If you need numbered pages for production, export Screenplay PDF instead.