Tabularia compared with iA Writer

Two ways to keep the noise down

iA Writer is built around a page with nothing else on it. There is no toolbar to look past, and its Focus Mode lights the sentence or paragraph you are working on while the rest of the text fades.

Tabularia can be every bit as bare, because it is as simple or as powerful as you want it to be. Focus Mode hides the bars and every panel at once, and what stays on screen beside the page is the Compass, a small disc in the corner that opens whichever single surface you ask it for. Paragraph focus dims everything but the paragraph you are writing, and the Working Scope narrows the page, the search and the word counts to the chapter or scene you are reading. The difference is what is waiting out of sight: in iA Writer it is the rest of one file, and here it is the rest of the book or the series, with the outline and minimap holding your place in it.

What a book needs that a file does not

iA Writer works on one plain-text file at a time, which suits an essay, a post, or a chapter written in a sitting. Markdown headings give you an outline to navigate by, and Content Blocks pull other files into one document, so a book can be assembled from parts. What the document does not carry is a model of the work itself: no scene or act, nothing that knows a promise made early is paid off late, and nowhere for an alternative version of a passage to live while you decide about it.

Tabularia keeps the structure inside the composition instead. There is no folder: a chapter is a level of the one continuous typeset manuscript you are already looking at, which is what outline moves through. Timelines follow a character's inner change or a plot line through the passages that carry them, each marker living in the paragraph rather than in a file beside it. And a draft holds another version of a paragraph, a scene, or the whole manuscript, merged back a difference at a time or all at once.

Why to switch

iA Writer is built around restraint and plain text on your own disk, for the piece you can hold in your head at once. Authorship marks what you typed against what you pasted, and Style Check flags clichés and clutter on your own device without telling you what to do about any of it. Tabularia's help to a reviser is structural rather than stylistic today.

Switch when the piece has grown into a book and finding your way around it has become part of the work. In a folder of Markdown files you remember where things are. Here the Outline takes you to any chapter in a click, and an anchor makes the scene you keep going back to one press away. What you need to check about a character is on a sheet beside the page, not in a second window. It stays quick at that length: typing and scrolling cost what is on screen, not what you have written. If you plan, a story shape lays the acts and chapters down before you start.

The short pieces need not live somewhere else. Each project is a row in the Projects tab, as many as you like, so the novel and this week's essay are one click apart. The other difference is when the styling happens. iA Writer separates writing from formatting on purpose. Tabularia sets the page as the book from the first sentence instead, down to the drop caps and the folios.

They also sit together comfortably. Markdown comes into Tabularia as a structured manuscript and goes back out alongside every other format a manuscript travels in, so you can draft a chapter in iA Writer and bring it in when the project needs to be a book.

Opening your iA Writer files

They are already Markdown, so there is no export step. Import the file. A file carrying iA Writer's own markers — its table of contents, content blocks, and +++ page breaks — is recognized, and the table-of-contents marker comes off the prose and switches on the book's Contents page in its place. Content-block lines and page breaks stay as text for you to tidy. The import guide lists exactly what triggers it.

Staying with iA Writer for now

• How do I organize a novel's chapters in iA Writer?
• iA Writer left Android. What now?