Tabularia compared with Craft

Two applications that care how it feels

Craft is built on the idea that software should feel as good as it functions. It is a document and notes app with nested pages and cards for planning, native on every device it runs on, and it can share or publish any page you make in it.

Tabularia takes the same position about craft and spends it on long-form work — on keeping a book legible to its author however large it grows. A single project can run to several books with search, the outline and the threads reaching across all of them, and each volume opens on its own title page. The page is typeset while you write, down to the drop caps and ornaments, but that is the easy part. Both applications think the surface matters. They differ on what the surface has to hold.

Blocks, and prose

A Craft document is built from blocks, which suits notes, plans, and pages that mix text with other things. A block is a unit you move, nest and rearrange.

Tabularia is a prose surface first, where the unit is the sentence and the paragraph. Nothing has to be assembled: the manuscript is already one typeset composition, and it stays as quick to scroll and type in at a million words as at ten thousand, which is measured rather than asserted. Around it sits a model of the thing you are writing rather than of the document you are typing: a chapter is a level of the work, not a block you happened to nest, and what sits beside the page is there to move through a book rather than to rearrange one. It produces the formats a manuscript travels in, and on any plan a complete local Project archive too.

Pictures still sit in the flow of it. Drop an image onto the page and it lands where you drop it; drag it into place, resize it from a corner with its proportions held, wrap the paragraphs around it, or set it behind the text for a full-page plate.

Why to switch

Craft is one place for everything you write and think about — notes, plans, documents, the pages you share with other people. That is what it is designed around, and Tabularia is the other way about on purpose: opening it puts you in the manuscript rather than among last week's meeting notes, and what sits beside the page is what the writing needs rather than what a working life does.

Switch when the manuscript is the point and you spend more time finding your way around it than writing in it. In nested pages a chapter is something you open your way down to. The Outline here lists every book, chapter and scene in reading order and goes to any of them in a click, while the timeline drawer keeps a thread's beats in view under the page. When you only want one stretch, the Working Scope narrows the page, search and counts to it. Drafts let you try a chapter another way and undo it. Craft includes sync in its plans; here the Cloud subscription carries your work between devices. Keeping notes and research in Craft and writing the manuscript somewhere built for one works perfectly well.

Moving Craft documents

Use Export As from the Share menu and pick TextBundle or Markdown, which keep the headings. Import that file; the headings become Chapters.