The iPad that still isn’t

It’s not a silly thought that the iPad and iOS, as a writing tool and environment, are very, very young. How many rich-text writing applications do you know that allow the user to create paragraph styles? Not to talk about character styles. Only recently has iOS added the Multilingual Typing feature, even though the list of languages supported is ridiculously short. See the list, which I got thanks to Multilingual Mac.

I see everywhere, in the area of writing apps, how developers try to bring about solutions to the needs of authors. Some examples would be Mellel, Notes Writer+, Notebooks 8 or the one I want to mention now: Tome. It has spell checking, it can make an index and a table of contents, it can add numbering to headings and it even allows the user to define paragraph styles. So then, if it’s so good, what’s the catch?

There’s no comparison between Tome and Mellel, a writing app with a sibling in macOS which shows limitations but is a lot more usable. Tome sports a writing and a preview mode, but the former cannot be adapted to the author’s preferences. As for paragraph styles, the user cannot set them as a style sheet, which means that all the work in styles is document-based only. The page number is not customisable and neither is the automatic table of contents.

I yearn for Tome and some other applications to become more capable, so as they can turn the iPad into the rich text writing environment it will become, some time in the future. We’ll have to wait to get the Nisus Writer of iOS. I’m sure the operative system could be more helpful facilitating the implementation of the features needed. In the meantime, we authors will keep enjoying other apps such as Scrivener and Ulysses (the one where I’m writing this very words), the two that right now stand out.