Where Did The Name “Tabularia” Come From?
Tabula is Latin for a writing tablet, the wax-covered board a Roman would write on, smooth over, and write on again. A tabularium was the room where writing was kept once it was worth keeping, the archive or record office of a household or a state. Tabularia is the plural of that word: the record rooms.
It is a fair description of what the software holds: not a page, but everything around the page that a long book accumulates.
Why It Exists
A book can take years to write. Everything that went into it — the research, the versions you abandoned, the decisions you can no longer remember making — should still be part of the same work at the end of them.
Long-form writing has depth, and the depth is most of what makes it worth doing. Managing that depth is a different job from writing, and most writing tools treat it as filing: a folder of documents here, a board of cards there, a wiki to keep in step by hand. Tabularia keeps the manuscript itself as the place all of it lives, so the ideas, notes and decisions stay next to the prose they belong to.
What It Is Not
Tabularia will not write the book for you. Help that reads what you wrote and tells you something useful is worth having, and some of it is planned: a plot hole, a continuity slip, a scene that would not really happen that way, a habit in the prose you have stopped noticing, another way a passage could sound, an idea when you are stuck. What it will not do is produce your chapters and hand them back for approval. The writing stays yours, and your manuscript is never training data; the FAQ says what such a feature would send and why.
It is not a wiki, a task board, or a real-time collaborative editor either. Other tools do those things well. This one is for the long single-authored work: drafting it, finding your way around it, revising it, and getting it out.
Local license purchases, optional feature-update renewals, and Cloud subscriptions support the work. There is no advertising or sale of your writing or personal information. The Local plan offers a free evaluation before purchase.
Who Makes It
I am Allen Mackley, and I build Tabularia on my own, under the name Mackley Studios. There is no team behind that name, and nobody else deciding what gets built. The software, this site, and the reply you get when you write to support all come from one person.
There are advantages to that. The person who answers your email is the person who designed and built the product, so a problem you report reaches whoever can fix it immediately. Nothing is decided by committee, so the software follows what writers actually need rather than what a roadmap promised a year ago. And the work goes into the writing tools themselves rather than into coordinating the people building them.
I have been building software for about twenty years, most of it the kind that has to keep working while people depend on it. At Grow I worked on a business intelligence platform where large data pipelines had to stay correct, and on the mobile application executives read them from. Before that I built browser-based video and 3D editing tools that stayed in sync across tabs and devices, which is a close cousin of the problem a manuscript poses: a large document, edited constantly, that must never lose a word.
I am also writing a novel. The Fathom is an epic fantasy series, and it is part of the inspiration for this application. An ambitious novel accumulates ideas, notes, research and decisions faster than a filing system keeps up with, and I kept losing hold of my own story while managing the pieces of it. I wanted that depth to live beside the prose rather than in another application. The first chapter is out to read if you are curious.
About a year of work has gone into Tabularia so far, six to eight months of it in this current round, and it is built here in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. Away from the desk I play guitar and work as an audio engineer, which turns out to be the same instinct as the typography here: a great deal of care spent on how something finally lands for the person on the other end.
If you have a question this page does not answer, write to me.