A free (preview) screenwriting app for iPhone and Mac.
No account. No eDraft server. Your scripts are files on your devices or in your own iCloud Drive.
App Store · edraft.xyz · Help · Privacy
eDraft formats your screenplay as you type. It opens and saves Final Draft and Fountain files, so a script can move between eDraft and other screenwriting software.
During production, scene numbers, page numbers and revision colours let everyone refer to the same part of a script. eDraft is built to keep them. When it saves a Final Draft file, it rewrites only the paragraphs you changed; everything else in the file, including data eDraft has no screen for, is written back as it was.
eDraft 2.0 is free (preview) on the App Store; see the FAQ. One download gives you the iPhone and the Mac app. Version 2.0 adds German and Ideas, a way to record a thought and place it in your script later.
- Final Draft and Fountain, both ways. Open, edit and save
.fdxand Fountain files in their own format. - Notes on a single word. Select a word or a phrase and add a note. The note stays on those words as you write, and it is kept in eDraft, Fountain and Final Draft files.
- Ideas. On iPhone, tap the microphone in the library and speak. eDraft saves the recording first. Then, if your iPhone has a speech model for your language, it writes down the words. Later, place the idea in a script as a note, action, dialogue or a new scene, on the iPhone or on the Mac (View > Ideas). Ideas reach the Mac through your own iCloud. You can also ask Siri: "Add an idea in eDraft".
- German. When your iPhone or Mac is set to German, menus, windows and messages are in German (the Mac's Help is still in English). INNEN. and AUSSEN. start a scene heading, and the writing suggestions offer them. An eDraft script can print (MEHR) and (FORTS.) instead of (MORE) and (CONT'D). A new installation in a German-speaking region (Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg) starts on A4 paper.
- Revisions. Mark a draft when you send your script out. From then on, an asterisk marks each changed line, on screen, in the PDF and in print. Revision colours follow the order used in production: after Goldenrod come Buff, Salmon and Cherry.
- Download eDraft from the App Store.
- Open the example scene from this repository, or start a new screenplay.
- Write, then export a PDF or save as Final Draft or Fountain.
The Help pages explain each feature.
| Price | Free (preview) |
| Platforms | iPhone and Mac, one App Store download |
| Version | 2.0 (2026-11-04) |
| Requires | iOS 26 or later · macOS 26 or later |
| Languages | English, German |
| Account | None |
| Where scripts live | Files on your devices, or in your own iCloud Drive |
| Open and save | Final Draft (.fdx), Fountain, plain text, eDraft's own document (.draft) |
| Export | PDF, Final Draft, Fountain, plain text; on iPhone also an eDraft document and rich text (RTF) |
| On iPhone only | Turn a PDF or a photo of a printed page into a new script (the text is read from the page) |
| Not yet supported | Word (.docx) files — planned |
| What | Result |
|---|---|
| Interface strings with a German translation | 911 of 911 (counted) ¹ |
| Swift tests in the app's code | 3,329 in 295 files (counted, not run for this page) ² |
The example .fdx, opened and saved without edits |
Same file, byte for byte: 2,528 bytes in, 2,528 bytes out ³ |
¹ Counted in the string catalogs of the code that shipped as 2.0, Siri phrases
included. The Mac's Help is still in English.
² XCTest methods and Swift Testing functions in the code that shipped as 2.0.
³ Checked with the code that shipped as 2.0, through the open-and-save path the
app uses. You can check it yourself: see Example.
The examples/ folder holds a short original scene in two formats:
demo-scene.fdx— Final Draft format, with a note and an omitted scene.demo-scene.fountain— the same scene in Fountain. Fountain has no way to mark an omitted scene, so scene 2 is absent and the numbering keeps the gap (1, 3).
Both files, as they stand in this repository:
30cca645c69f9f5f59eaff3b62543b4ff9b1ffaf4463d0bfc1c412f791d09b86 demo-scene.fdx
153160c3cbdd8319e9641b487dda7b1d957a59f45457f58c88a90437edb0eaf3 demo-scene.fountain
To check the round trip yourself: download demo-scene.fdx, open it in eDraft on
the Mac, choose File > Save without changing anything, then run
shasum -a 256 demo-scene.fdx on the saved file. The checksum is the same as
above.
Nine principles guide the work. When a principle and an easier implementation disagree, the principle wins. Three of them:
- Nothing is lost silently. When something cannot be kept, the app says so.
- The writer's text is theirs. The app does not rewrite a writer's words to fit its own model.
- Measure; do not assume. Where eDraft has to match another app, we check what that app actually writes.
Read all nine in the design principles.
- Product overview — what eDraft is, and who it is for
- Design principles — the rules the work follows
- Roadmap — what works, what is in progress, what is planned
- FAQ — common questions
- Development record — what was built and decided, phase by phase
- Changelog — what changed in each release
- A bug, or something wrong in these documents — open an issue with the bug report form.
- A question or an idea — Discussions
- A security issue — please report it privately; see SECURITY.md.
- Anything else, including research licences — edraft@ysr.design
This repository holds eDraft's documentation, example files and images. The app's source code is private, so there is no build to run and no code to send a pull request against. Contributions here are documentation corrections and bug reports (see CONTRIBUTING.md).
The contents of this repository are proprietary. Copyright © 2025–2026 Yasir Dora. All rights reserved. See LICENSE for what you may do with the example files.
Made by a writer, for writers.