Tabularia compared with Vellum

When the formatting happens

Vellum is a formatter for self-publishing authors, built for one specific moment: you have a finished manuscript, and you need files a retailer will accept and a printer will not argue with. You bring the draft in and pick a style, and there is very little to learn on the way. It is a step at the end, though, and everything before it happens somewhere else.

Tabularia puts the formatting at the front. Your manuscript is typeset as you write it — real pages, with the drop caps, ornaments and folios you choose and each book keeping its own front and back matter. You are not imagining what the page will look like. You are looking at it while you write the sentence.

And everything before that

Formatting is the last few days of a project that took a year. Tabularia is built for the rest of it. The manuscript is one continuous typeset composition you can hold the shape of at length. A draft lets you try a chapter another way and merge it back a difference at a time or all at once, and a collaborator you invite can propose changes you accept or reject — with the rest of what it carries under the same page. Then the file the shop asked for comes out the other end.

Why to switch

Vellum does production and nothing else, which is why it goes deep on it: two dozen trim sizes, curated book styles, and a live preview that renders your book as a Kindle, an iPad, a Kobo and a printed paperback while you work. It assumes the manuscript is finished and written somewhere else, and that you are only after the files.

Switch for the year before the files. A long project or a whole series lives in one place, and you move around it from the Outline, a chapter or a scene at a click, with the cast on Sheets beside the page. Planning can start from a story shape, and the page stays quick at any length. The formatting comes with it, on trim-size presets from mass market through trade hardcover, and the print layout, the PDF, and the EPUB all come off the page you wrote on. It installs on macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS and Android, where Vellum is Mac only.

Getting text back out of Vellum

Vellum can give the words back: File → Export Content As → Word File writes the content, front and back matter, and chapter structure. That is also the fix when the Word file you started from has fallen behind the corrections you made in Vellum, which this answer goes into.

Staying with Vellum for now

• I fixed typos in Vellum. Now my Word file is out of date