Tabularia compared with Google Docs

A shared document, and a manuscript

Google Docs is a shared document editor that a great deal of writing happens in, because it is already open and it costs nothing. Two people can type at once, comments thread properly, and the revision history has saved plenty of work.

What it has no concept of is a book. Docs does know about parts — document tabs divide one file into sections, nested up to three levels, and heading styles populate an outline within each. What none of that describes is a manuscript. A tab is a section of a document rather than a chapter of a work. Beneath it there is no scene or act, and across the whole file there is no count and nothing that follows a character from one tab to the next.

Tabularia gives that same continuous writing a shape. Books, acts, chapters and scenes are levels of one composition rather than headings you agreed to treat as chapters, so outline is the book's actual order and anchors hold a story thread to the paragraph carrying it. Nothing here depends on a convention you have to keep to.

What happens at book length

A novel is an unusual thing to ask of any document editor, and the advice writers pass around is consistent: once a project gets long, split it into a document per chapter. That works, and it costs you the ability to see the whole of it at all.

Tabularia is built the other way around. Scrolling, resizing the page and typing are proportional to what is on screen, not to how much you have written — measured at ten thousand words and at a million. So the manuscript stays one continuous typeset composition however long it runs. The minimap beside the page shows where you are in all of it, and any book, chapter or scene is a click away in the outline. When you want the rest out of the way, working scope narrows the workspace to the part you are in. Add a second book and the volumes sit in order in the same project.

Why to switch

Google Docs is built around real-time co-editing, so if you and a co-writer need to be in the same paragraph at the same moment, that is how Docs does it. Tabularia collaborates in turns instead. You hand a collaborator their own draft to work in, and what comes back is a set of differences with a name against each, yours to take or leave.

Docs' Suggesting mode is the nearest thing it has. Anyone allowed to comment switches from Editing to Suggesting and types into the document; insertions show in color, deletions are struck through, and you accept or reject each one, or all of them together from Tools → Review suggested edits. The difference is where the suggestions land: in the one live document, among sentences you are still writing. A collaborator's draft in Tabularia leaves your manuscript as it is until you merge it, a difference at a time or all at once.

Move to Tabularia when the document has started to fight you. Docs holds your letters and your invoices alongside the novel, and finding a chapter means scrolling or opening another file. Opening Tabularia puts you in your projects and nothing else, each one a row in the Projects tab. Inside one, a sheet for every person and place opens beside the page, and the timeline drawer holds the plot under it. Pin a single thread as your Working Scope and the canvas closes up around it, so you can read one subplot end to end and see where it goes quiet.

Your work sits on your own device and keeps working without a connection, and the document you have been drafting in comes across with its chapters and comments.

Getting a Google Doc out

Tabularia never signs in to Google, so the move is a file. Accept or reject every suggestion first, then choose File → Download → Microsoft Word and import what downloads. A suggestion still open travels as a tracked change, and the import takes each one as accepted, then says so.

Heading 1 paragraphs become Chapters, and comments come with the text they mark. A manuscript split across tabs needs one more step, which the tabs answer covers.

Staying with Google Doc for now

• Why is Google Docs so slow on my long novel?
• Google Docs says my book is too large
• How do I reorder chapters in Google Docs?
• How do I download or print a whole book from Google Docs tabs?
• Is there a Google Docs template for writing a novel?
• My Google Doc went blank. Is my novel gone?
• Google Docs flagged my manuscript and locked me out