Tabularia compared with Atticus

Both go end to end

Atticus exists because self-publishing authors were paying for a writing application and then paying again, per book, to have the result formatted. It answers that with one purchase: write in it, then produce print-ready PDF and retailer-ready EPUB with themes, trim sizes and device previews.

Tabularia covers the same span and puts the formatting at the front of it rather than at the end. Your manuscript is typeset as you write — real pages, with the drop caps, ornaments and folios you choose, and a series carries a separate set of front matter per volume. There is no step where you finish the draft and pour it into something else to find out what it looks like, because you have been looking at it the whole time.

The year before the files

Most of the work of a book happens in the year before there is a file to make, and that is where Tabularia spends its attention. You can try a version of a chapter without losing the one you had and reconcile the two line by line, and you can hand the manuscript to a collaborator who returns a redline you accept or reject — with the rest of what it carries under the same page. Then the file comes out the other end. One application, from the first sentence to the upload.

Why to switch

Atticus is built for the production end. Trim sizes, retailer output, previews of how a file will look on particular e-readers: that is where it puts its attention, and it is the part of the job it is for. Tabularia sets the page itself, with trim-size presets from mass market through trade hardcover and margins to match, but it does not simulate individual devices.

Switch when you want the whole of it in one place, and especially the long middle where you need to move around a big manuscript. The Outline puts any scene one click away, while the timeline drawer keeps the plot in view under the page. A series can sit in one manuscript, its threads running through every volume, with the cast on Sheets beside you as you write. The page already looks like the book, and it stays as quick at book length as it was on the first page. Nothing is lost either way — it exports DOCX for moving the Manuscript to Atticus when a print specification calls for it. Its own PDF and EPUB come as marked proofs during the evaluation and as final files once the Local plan is paid for, or with Cloud, and a DOCX or Markdown copy stays open to you even if the evaluation lapses before you decide.

Bringing an Atticus book in

Export the ePub from under the previewer. Its chapters come across one for one, pictures included. A Word export works as well and keeps the chapter titles, though not the formatting you set up in Atticus — that is the part Tabularia does its own way.