Tabularia compared with Scrivener

Closer than it looks

Scrivener's central idea is the Binder: a book is a tree of documents, one per scene or chapter, and you work on one without the other four hundred pages in the way. It is worth saying plainly that this is not as far from Tabularia as the two interfaces suggest. Scrivenings mode reads a folder of those documents as one continuous scroll, and Tabularia's working scope narrows a single composition down to one chapter or scene. Both applications let you see the whole thing or just this part; they arrive from opposite directions and meet in the middle.

The difference that does not close is what the page looks like while you write on it. Scrivener defers that decision to Compile, where the manuscript you typed becomes the book at the end. In Tabularia there is no compile step, because the page is typeset as a book from the first sentence, down to the drop caps and the running heads — and the PDF a printer receives is set by the same layout that set the page you wrote on.

What each one does with a change

Scrivener keeps snapshots of a document, so you can take a copy before a rewrite and read the old one beside the new.

Tabularia treats a rewrite as something you compare and merge rather than something you keep a copy of. A draft can hold another version of a paragraph, a scene, a chapter, or the whole manuscript; merging walks you through the differences with the surrounding writing still on the page, one at a time or all at once; and a collaborator you invite writes into a draft of their own and sends it back as a redline you accept or reject.

The corkboard and the timeline drawer

Scrivener's corkboard lays a folder out as index cards, one per document, each showing that scene's synopsis. It is a good place to reorder a chapter. Drag a card and the document moves with it.

Two things limit it. The corkboard takes the editor's place, so you are looking at the cards or at the prose unless you split the window to hold both. And a card stands for a whole document: open it and you land at the top of the scene, while the synopsis on its face is a second account of that scene, accurate until the rewrite nobody carries back to the card.

Tabularia's timeline drawer opens beneath the page instead, and the manuscript stays up while you read the plan. Every marker in it is an anchor in the prose itself, on a single point or across a passage, so selecting one takes the canvas to the exact paragraph it marks. Rewrite that paragraph and the marker goes with it. The drawer is also not bounded by a folder: each strand runs the length of the book, under the Outline, and you can read a character's arc across forty chapters without opening any of them.

Writing on more than one device

Scrivener leaves sync to a cloud folder — Dropbox, iCloud Drive, or another. That works, and plenty of writers run it happily for years, but it is yours to set up and yours to keep straight. Literature & Latte's own manual gives the rules: let the sync finish before you open a project and before you shut the computer down, and never open a project in two places at once, which it calls "a surefire way to cause major headaches." Its knowledge base adds that "no syncing solution is 100% reliable," and that it can take no responsibility for work lost that way. On an iPhone or iPad the one built-in route is Dropbox, and it syncs when you tap it.

Tabularia syncs itself. Sign in on a second device and your project is there, current, with no folder to place and no service to configure. The application holds a connection open while you work, so each change travels on its own as it is saved and a second device catches up within moments. That is what the Cloud subscription buys, alongside backup and sharing a manuscript for review.

When a backup is the thing you need

Scrivener's automatic backup is a zip of the whole project, written by default when you close it, into the folder its Backup settings name. Writers need it more often than they should. The common way a Scrivener project breaks is a sync collision — open on two machines at once, or a laptop waking to save a stale copy before Dropbox delivered the new one. Recovering from one means opening a folder of dated zips and working out which of them predates the damage. By default only five zips are kept, the oldest deleted as each new one is written, and the manual warns that a day of opening and closing can rotate out the copy you wanted. A project left open all week has, under the default settings, not been backed up all week.

Tabularia does not give sync a project folder to collide over. With the Cloud plan, every change is saved to online backup while you work, and snapshots are named restore points you take before a risky rewrite and bring back from inside the application. In Chrome or Edge you can add a backup folder on your own disk as well, refreshed daily. If a Scrivener project is already in trouble, the guides to chapters lost to sync and a project that will not open walk through getting it back.

Why to switch

Scrivener writes unformatted and shapes the book at the end, from scenes you assemble. Compile is where all its deferred decisions get answered at once — a large tool with a learning curve to match. It is sold outright, and the backups are yours to run.

Switch for the way a long book is held together here. The Binder takes you to a document; the Outline takes you to a place in a manuscript that is all there, and labels on its rows let you filter to one point of view and pin it as your Working Scope, so that character's scenes read as one continuous run. An anchor marks the paragraph a beat happens in rather than the document it sits in, and Sheets keep the facts you check open in a panel beside the page. However long the manuscript runs, it stays responsive, because the page only does the work of what is on screen.

You also see the book rather than waiting for a compile, and a collaborator can work on the manuscript and hand it back as a redline. It runs where Scrivener does not — Linux, Android and a browser tab — and syncs itself rather than leaving it to you.

You can find out on the book you are already writing. The project comes across whole, as the next section shows.

Bringing a Scrivener project across

Tabularia reads the .scriv package itself, so there is nothing to compile or export first.

1. Close the project in Scrivener, and let your sync service finish.
2. On a Mac, Finder shows the .scriv as one file. Right-click it and choose Compress. On Windows it is already a folder.
3. In the Projects tab, import the .zip as a file, or choose Import folder as new manuscript for the folder.
4. Read the new Outline against your Binder. Folders in the Draft become Chapters, and the documents inside them become Scenes.

Only the Draft travels. The Research folder and the Trash stay behind, and so do synopses, document notes, and snapshots, and the import review says so. Documents you had excluded from Compile arrive as ordinary text and are named, so nothing silently disappears. Character sketches kept outside the Draft are worth moving by hand into Sheets — the character profile template maps onto them. The import guide covers every other route.

Staying with Scrivener for now

• Scrivener feels too complicated. What is simpler?
• Scrivener sync lost my chapters. How do I get them back?
• My Scrivener project won't open
• Scrivener for Windows is missing Mac features
• Is there Scrivener for Linux, a Chromebook, or Android?
• My editor uses Word and I write in Scrivener
• How do I open a Scrivener project without Scrivener?