Proscenium

An open-source, cross-platform, free alternative to Final Draft for writing stage plays and screenplays.

Proscenium began as a stage-play editor and is growing toward broader Final Draft parity. Already delivered: stage-play, screenplay, and TV/teleplay document types; production reports; scene numbering; revision drafts; index cards; and Final Draft .fdx interop. Remaining roadmap items (Story Map, page-locking, tagging, real-time collaboration, custom dictionary) are tracked in docs/superpowers/specs/.

Features

• Structured editor with industry-style elements per document type — stage play (Act/Scene, Stage Direction, Character, Dialogue, Parenthetical, Transition) and screenplay (Scene Heading, Action, Character, Dialogue, Parenthetical, Transition, Shot).
• Document-type switcher — write in stage-play, screenplay, or TV/teleplay format; element set, Enter/Tab transitions, and page margins adapt to the chosen format.
• Production tools — sequential scene numbering and Final Draft-style revision drafts (Production White → Blue → Pink → …).
• Index cards — Beat Board-style scene view with synopses and click-to-jump.
• Final Draft-style element cycling — Enter and Tab/Shift+Tab flow between element types as you write (Character → Dialogue → Action …).
• SmartType autocomplete for character names, scene/act headings, and transitions, learned live from your script.
• Formatting in Courier 12 on US-Letter page geometry, with pagination and page numbers.
• Scene/Act navigator for jump-navigation.
• Production reports — character (speeches/words), scene-to-page, and location breakdowns.
• Find & replace and webview-native spellcheck.
• Title-page editor.
• File formats: native .osp (JSON), Fountain import/export, Final Draft .fdx import/export, and PDF export.
• Cross-platform: native desktop builds for Windows, macOS, and Linux via Tauri.

Tech stack

• Tauri 2 — thin Rust shell (native dialogs + file I/O)
• React 18 + Vite + TypeScript
• Tiptap / ProseMirror — structured document editor
• pdf-lib — PDF export
• Vitest — tests

All document logic lives in the TypeScript frontend and is unit-tested; the Rust shell only does file dialogs and disk I/O.

Development

npm install          # install JS dependencies
npm run tauri dev    # run the desktop app in dev mode
npm test             # run the test suite (Vitest)
npm run build        # typecheck + build the frontend bundle

Linux desktop builds require system WebKitGTK libraries (webkit2gtk-4.1, libsoup-3.0, plus the usual GTK stack).

Building distributables

npm run tauri build

Artifacts are produced under src-tauri/target/release/bundle/:

• Windows: .msi and .exe (NSIS)
• macOS: .dmg and .app
• Linux: .deb, .rpm, and .AppImage

The .deb and .rpm build fully offline. AppImage packaging downloads the linuxdeploy helper from GitHub on first run, so it needs network access (the CI workflow handles this on GitHub runners).

A GitHub Actions workflow (.github/workflows/build.yml) builds all three platforms on tag pushes.

Project layout

src/
  formats/     document-type definitions (stage play, screenplay)
  editor/      Tiptap schema, keymap, pagination, find
  io/          .osp, Fountain, FDX, PDF, block<->doc conversion, file commands
  smarttype/   list harvesting + autocomplete UI
  navigator/   scene/act outline
  reports/     character / scene / location reports + panel
  production/  scene numbering, revision drafts
  planning/    index cards / scene view
  state/       document store (dirty-state tracking)
  ui/          toolbar, find bar, title-page editor, file commands
src-tauri/     Rust shell (file dialogs + read/write commands)
docs/superpowers/   spec + implementation plan

License

MIT