Tabula
No need for manual formatting <i>here</i>
$9.99 Developer Charles Imhoff, tabula.cpimhoff.com Requirements OS X 10.10 or later
Distraction-free writing apps are becoming a big industry on Mac and iOS, meaning that any new ones need to do something very clever to stand out. Tabula (styled with a backtick ` before its name on the App Store) does that with its clever auto-formatting.
The idea is simple: you write a plain text document without worrying about breaking your flow to denote whether something is a list, or a link, or a headline, and so on. The app detects whether it thinks a line you’ve written should be styled that way, and automatically does so. When you eventually export the document, it will be professionally laid out, with no effort on your part – or at least, that’s the theory.
Obviously, how well the app works depends entirely on how smart its detection is. In reality, you kind of need to know how to get it to trigger, which takes some trial and error. But it could still be preferable to having to reach for the extra symbols even of Markdown, which is really the simplest way to style plain text as it stands (and is supported by many distraction-free editors).
A heading, for example, must either be very short, or written in all capitals, or with a capital at the start of each word for Tabula to interpret it as such. Easy once you know, but it took us a few attempts to confirm. Similarly, you can create two-column tables (a feature we particularly appreciate) by entering what should be in the first column using the style of a heading, followed by a dash, then writing the second half however you want. You can emphasize any text with the use of a backtick. One useful trick is that you can tell the styling engine to ignore a line by using a keyboard command, should it be adding some styling that you don’t want.
When it comes time to finish and export, you click the symbol in the top-right corner. You can choose from a range of different looks for your final document, each of which styles the various elements differently, and then export as PDF or HTML. These are fine, but we do wish we could get an RTF file or equivalent so the output could be used live in another document, or the fonts tweaked.
Tabula also has the now seemingly obligatory night mode, and a good set of customization options. There’s also an iOS app, which works essentially the same way.
the bottom line. Tabula makes it easy to turn a few notes into a styled, professionallooking doc, but it takes some figuring out, and we want more flexibility.