Tabularia compared with Dabble

Two places to lay the plot out

Dabble's Plot Grid is a board of plot points laid out in columns beside your manuscript. You move cards around until the shape of the story is right, then write to it. For a plotter that is a comfortable way to work, and a grid linked to a book keeps up with it: each row is a scene, and reordering the scenes reorders the grid.

Tabularia has a plotting surface too. The timeline drawer opens under the page and holds as many strands as your project needs, from the main plot to a promise you have to pay off in the last act. Each one is laid out across the manuscript, so you can read a single thread on its own.

You can block a plot out there before you have written any of it. The plus on the Outline lane asks how many Acts, Chapters, and Scenes to lay down, and a lane of your own takes beats in bulk the same way; a story shape will do the whole skeleton in one go, if you already know the form.

What the markers are attached to

A Dabble plot point belongs to a whole scene. That keeps the grid in step with the order of the book, but not with what happens inside a scene: a card on a board is a second description of your project. It says Dantès learns who betrayed him, and the scene that does it is somewhere else. Revise one and the other quietly goes out of date.

In Tabularia a point anchor marks the exact moment and a range anchor marks the passage, so a marker sits on the words themselves rather than in a record kept alongside them. Click a beat and the manuscript scrolls to the passage it marks. Rewrite that passage and the marker moves with it, because it was never a separate card that could fall out of step.

Notes on the page

Dabble has two kinds. Sticky notes are colored squares that float in the gutter beside the text, and you can hide them all at once. Comments are cards running down the right-hand gutter, threaded, and gone from view once resolved.

Tabularia keeps a note where it is about. A comment belongs to an anchor on the passage, and its card opens from the anchor and closes again when the pointer leaves, unless you pin it open to work beside it. The page stays clear until you ask for the note.

From manuscript to book

Dabble exports to Word, Google Docs, Markdown, and a web link. A PDF comes only through the browser's print dialog, in plain twelve-point type, and there is no EPUB and no trim size to set; the book's layout happens in some other application.

Tabularia lays the book out while you write it, and the export carries that page into an EPUB and a print PDF, the pictures, drop caps and ornaments included. Name Kindle Direct Publishing as the printer, and the PDF is measured against the margins KDP will accept before it is saved.

Why to switch

Dabble plots on a board first, and puts streaks and progress tracking near the center of how it works. It also supports two people writing at once, each in a color of their own, where Tabularia takes turns with a collaborator you invite, who returns a draft you merge.

It is ahead in places. Its goal dialog takes a start date, a deadline and your days off, asks whether the words already written count, and works out the daily target for you. Grammar and style checking are built in, powered by ProWritingAid, alongside a thesaurus and Read to Me, which reads a passage back aloud.

The plans differ in how writing and collaboration are billed. Dabble is a subscription with a fourteen-day trial, and comments, track changes, and sticky notes wait for its higher tier. A co-author needs a subscription of their own. The people you invite to read or edit in Tabularia need no paid account.

Switch if you want the plan and the prose to be one thing you move between without losing your place. Select a beat in the timeline drawer and the page goes to the sentence it marks, and the arrows at the head of the drawer step to the next beat on that strand. The Outline does the same for chapters and scenes, and the people and places you need to check are Sheets in the panel beside the page. A long book stays as quick to work in as a short one. Every project you keep, however many, waits in the Projects tab.

It also keeps the measuring lighter: a rolling word-count goal in the document header, and a timer you start when you want the session to have an end. You can start writing during a free evaluation, then purchase the Local plan or subscribe to the Cloud plan. Publishing a draft as a web page comes with either. Sync and sharing come with the Cloud plan, at $20 a month.

Leaving Dabble with your book

Export the book from Dabble to Word, choosing Dabble Format rather than Manuscript Format so your own formatting comes along. Since its 3.0 release the Word file carries comments and tracked changes, so accept or reject those in Dabble first: an import here takes any change still open as accepted. Then drop the .docx into Tabularia's Projects tab.

Chapters come from the file's Heading 1 paragraphs, so read the Outline once when it opens. The Plot Grid is not part of a manuscript export. Rebuild the beats you still need as anchors on a timeline, each on the passage it belongs to. The import guide has the details.