Tabularia compared with Storyist

Cards beside the page, and markers in it

Storyist is an Apple-native writing app. You sketch a story on index cards and refine it with plot, character, and setting sheets, then keep the cards next to the manuscript while you write, so the plan stays visible without taking the page. Its manuscript and screenplay templates produce submission-ready output without a formatting pass.

Tabularia keeps the same information in a different place. A timeline marker is anchored to the passage it marks rather than written on a card beside it, so clicking a beat scrolls the manuscript to the paragraph that carries it, and rewriting that paragraph moves the marker with it. Sheets for people, places, items and concepts sit beside the page for the details you want at hand.

The difference shows up on the second pass. A card is a second description of a scene, kept in step by hand. An anchor was never separate from the prose, so there is nothing to keep in step. Storyist does keep comments and bookmarks at a point in the text; it is its plot sheets and index cards that belong to a section or a scene as a whole.

Moving things around works in both. On Storyist's storyboard you drag a card and the section follows. In the Tabularia Outline you drag a row, and the chapter or scene moves with its prose — including a scene lifted out of one chapter and set down in another.

One composition, and what that buys

In Tabularia a project holds one continuous typeset manuscript with books, acts, chapters and scenes as levels inside it. The outline and minimap move through the whole of it, and adding a second book puts the volumes in order in the same project, each keeping its own front and back matter and page numbering. Revision gets the same attention. A draft branches whatever you point it at, from a single paragraph up to the whole manuscript, and it comes home a difference at a time or all at once. A collaborator you invite gets a draft of their own to write in, and what returns is a redline over your wording rather than a file to reconcile by hand.

Where the book gets made

Storyist makes a real book. Its Book editor gathers the manuscript's files into an ePub, a Kindle file or a print-ready PDF, starting from templates that include Blurb's trade formats. It sets the trim size and mirrored margins, adds bleed, hyphenates, and builds the table of contents.

What differs is when you see it. In Storyist the book is assembled in that separate editor once the writing is in files; in Tabularia the page you write on is already the book, set to its trim size with its running heads and chapter openings, and the PDF and EPUB are taken from that same page.

Why to switch

Storyist treats a story as cards you arrange and then write against, on a rich-text document model with the comments, images and style sheets a word processor made familiar. It is sold as a one-time license, with the Mac app and the iPhone and iPad app bought separately. A project travels between them through iCloud or Dropbox, which Storyist checks every minute or two; if both devices change a file before it catches up, you are asked which version to keep.

It is ahead in one small way worth knowing. Its Snippets expand an abbreviation into text when you press Tab, and it ships a set for dialogue, so the punctuation around a speech tag types itself. What it has no way to do is hand the manuscript to a collaborator and take their changes back; there is no track changes, and a review happens outside the app.

Switch if you want the plan attached to the prose rather than beside it. A beat in the timeline drawer is a place in the text, so moving through the plan is moving through the book. Labels on the Outline let you filter to one thread and pin it, and the page then shows only that thread's passages, closed up into one read. It stays responsive as the manuscript runs long, and every project you have is a row in the same Projects tab, one click from the next.

New projects start from a template here too, the screenplay among them, which opens on the industry grid with Final Draft and Fountain files in and out. It runs on Mac and iPad alongside Windows, Linux and Android, and it sets the page as a finished book while you write on it.

From Storyist, by way of Scrivener

Storyist's File → Export can write a Scrivener project. Choose that and import the .scriv, then check the Outline against Storyist's sections. A DOCX export is the simpler route when the chapter headings are already styled. Either way, what arrives is the prose: the index-card summaries do not come through the Scrivener import, and story sheets have no export of their own, so retype the characters and places you still use as sheets. A Storyist trial that has run out still exports.