Writing software for long articles and blog posts.

The piece that outgrew the text box

Start an article and the page opens as the thing you are making: a title, a standfirst, a byline, a date, and then the body. No title page, no chapters, no running headers — the shape of something read straight through.

A three-thousand-word piece is comfortable almost anywhere. A text box starts to fail you at ten, twenty, forty thousand words — the long-read, the reported feature, the technical explainer, the essay that turned into something bigger than you planned. That length has all a book's problems and none of its scaffolding. You scroll to find things. You keep the structure in your head. You cannot see the shape of the whole.

Tabularia treats a long article as what it is. Working in it costs the same whether the piece runs to three thousand words or fifty, because scrolling and typing are proportional to what is on screen rather than to how much you have written. The piece stays one continuous typeset composition however far it runs. The outline moves you to any section in a click, and the minimap holds your position in the whole of it. And because it is typeset while you write, the proportions are visible: where the long stretch sits, whether the opening runs too far before the first turn, how much a reader meets before they decide to stay.

Two versions of the opening

The hardest paragraph in an article is usually the first one, and the usual way to try another is to keep a copy somewhere and lose track of which was better.

A draft here holds an alternative version of exactly the part you are unsure about — one paragraph, a section, or the whole piece — and you switch between them in place. When you decide, merging walks through the differences one at a time. You can take the new opening and still keep the sentence you liked from the old one. Snapshots cover the larger case: a state to go back to when a rewrite went somewhere you did not want.

Keeping an argument straight

A long piece makes promises early and has to pay them off. Anchors mark the moment where something is claimed, set up, or left hanging. Timelines lay those markers out across the article, so you can read one strand on its own — the argument, the counterargument, a running example.

Because each marker is fastened to the passage rather than kept in a separate outline, rewriting the passage cannot put the two out of step. Sheets hold sources, people, and the facts you will need again, within reach of the sentence that needs them.

Pictures in the flow

A long article usually carries figures — a photograph, a chart, a screenshot of the thing you are describing. Drop one onto the page and it lands where you drop it. Drag it into position. Resize it from a corner handle with its proportions held, nudge it with the arrow keys, or move it to another page. Wrap the paragraphs around it, or set it behind the text where you want a full-bleed plate.

It carries into the exports that can hold one: DOCX, EPUB, HTML, and PDF embed the picture, and Markdown links it from an images folder beside the document.

Sending it to an editor

With a Cloud subscription, an invitation link gives a reader the piece to read or a collaborator a draft to write into. What comes back is a redline. You read it in place, with the surrounding writing on the page, and accept or reject one change at a time or all at once. Neither of them needs a paid account.

Publishing it

Either plan can publish the piece as a readable web page with a link you share, updated when you choose. For a piece going somewhere else instead, the export formats cover the usual destinations — Markdown for most publishing platforms, HTML, DOCX for an editor who works in Word.

• HTML
• DOCX
• EPUB
• PDF
• Markdown
• plain text
• Fountain
• Final Draft
• Project archive
• print

More than one piece

A project holds one continuous manuscript, and a manuscript can hold more than one book. So a series of related posts, a newsletter run, or the essays that will become a collection can all live in one place. Search, the outline, timelines, and anchors reach across every one of them.

Getting started

An article is written and kept on your own device, and Tabularia is currently in Released and maintained. The Cloud plan adds the things that have to leave the device: backup, sync between your machines, and sharing the piece for review. The Pricing page lists current plan limits. The feature page carries the full feature and storage detail, and the guide walks through the workflow.