Highland Active
The Fountain-native Mac screenwriter from a Fountain creator.
At a glance
- Maker
- Quote-Unquote Apps (John August)
- First release
- 2012
- Status
- Active — still developed and sold
- Platforms
- Mac, iPad, iOS
- Pricing
- Highland Pro subscription ~$59.99/yr (or $9.99 monthly); older Highland 2 frozen but usable
- Native format
- Highland (.highland)
What it is
Highland reads and writes plain Fountain text with famous elegance — the de-facto converter between Final Draft and everything plain-text. The current app is Highland Pro (2025); your scripts remain Fountain files no matter what.
What people are saying
The good
The writing experience earns consistent respect: minimal, elegant, distraction-free Fountain editing where tab-key formatting just works. Fans call it the most faithful implementation of Fountain on the Mac and credit it with stripping first drafts down to nothing but writing.
The bad
The 2025 move from one-time purchase to a subscription dominates modern sentiment, and not kindly. Many long-time users feel the Pro feature set is too close to the old Highland 2 to justify it, Highland 2 itself is frozen, and some announce their departure over the principle alone.
Paraphrased consensus from user reviews, forums and retrospective coverage across the web.
Where it came from
John August and Nima Yousefi shipped Highland in 2012 as a Fountain/FDX/PDF conversion utility, grew it into a full free screenwriting app (Highland 2, 2018), and moved to the Highland Pro subscription in March 2025 — loudly noted on the Scriptnotes podcast.
Worth knowing
Because .highland files are TextBundle packages of plain Fountain, nothing you write in Highland can ever be locked in.
Getting scripts in and out
Imports: Final Draft (.fdx), Fountain (.fountain), PDF (.pdf)
Exports: Final Draft (.fdx), Fountain (.fountain), PDF (.pdf)