Tabularia compared with Evernote

Where a novel's fragments collect

A lot of books begin in Evernote without anyone deciding they should. A line that arrives on a walk goes into the phone, and over a few months it is joined by clipped articles, photographs of places, and the odd scene talked into a voice memo. Collecting like that is what Evernote is for.

It runs natively on Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android as well as the web, and its search reads the text inside photos and PDFs, so the scanned newspaper cutting turns up when you look for the name in it. Semantic Search goes a step further and matches by meaning rather than exact words. AI Transcribe turns a recording into text.

Tabularia is not a capture tool, and it does not try to be one. Keep collecting in the app already in your pocket, and bring across what the book turns out to need. A sheet holds what you found out about a character or a place in its fields and notes, with a picture to put a face to it, and it opens in the panel beside the chapter you are writing.

When the notes have to become a book

The trouble starts with the draft itself. Each scene or chapter becomes its own note, and notes sort by title or by date rather than by story order; arranging them by hand is a request Evernote's forum has carried for years. Writers number their titles, or keep a contents note full of links, to hold the order together. The word count lives in each note's info panel, so the total for the book is a sum you keep yourself.

In Tabularia the book is one manuscript, and its order is the order you read it in. Chapters and scenes sit where the story puts them, you scroll from the first page to the last without opening anything, and dragging a scene in the outline moves the prose with it. The count covers the whole book, or only the chapter that Working Scope narrows it to.

Revising, and the file at the end

Evernote keeps periodic copies of every note. Its note history lets you preview an older one and restore it from Mac, Windows, or the web. It is a safety net for one note, though, not a way to try a chapter two ways.

Tabularia gives the second attempt a place of its own. A draft holds the braver version of a chapter beside the original, and when you have decided you merge it a difference at a time or all at once. A collaborator you invite works the same way, in a draft of their own, and nothing of theirs reaches the book until you accept it.

Then comes the file someone else will read. Evernote exports ENEX, HTML, and PDF, and only from its desktop apps. Literary agents often want a Word file, and readers an EPUB. Tabularia exports both, along with a print PDF laid out at a book's trim size, Markdown, and plain text.

Why to switch

Evernote is a notebook for everything, and a novel is one notebook in it beside the recipes and the receipts. Its free plan holds fifty notes in one notebook, which a book written a scene per note outgrows quickly. Tabularia holds writing projects and nothing else, with no ceiling on how many or how long. Every project is a row in the Projects tab, so the novel and the short story you started beside it are a click apart.

The bigger change is how you move around the book once it is long. Search in a notebook finds notes. Here, find steps through every place a name appears in story order and paints each match on the Minimap, which shows at a glance whether a character drops out of the middle. An anchor on a scene you keep going back to makes it a place you reach in one press. The timeline drawer under the page keeps the plan in view while you write. And the page stays quick to type in as the book grows, because what it redraws is what is on screen. The work sits on your own device and goes on working without a connection.

Both take a careful line on AI. Evernote builds it in, switched on by default, and says plainly that your notes train no model, its own or anyone else's. Tabularia builds nothing in. If you want an assistant reading along, the connector lets one you already use read the manuscript and propose changes that wait for your decision.

Plenty of writers keep both. Evernote stays the pocket notebook, and what the book needs from it moves into a sheet beside the chapter that uses it.

Getting notes out of Evernote

Export runs only in the Mac and Windows apps. Select the notebook that holds the draft, right-click, choose Export…, and pick single-page HTML, which writes every note into one file. Import that file into Tabularia; headings become chapters you can adjust afterwards. Evernote exports a hundred notes at a time unless you take the whole notebook, so exporting the notebook is the quicker route.