Best Free Word Processor - Jarte a New Face in Town!
If you don't write novels, reports and documentations all the time, but like to use a Word Processor for letters, memos and how-to's, you will love Jarte.
It's lightweight so loads in a jiffy, and deserves the word "courageous" for its clean fresh looks. Task oriented is in; and menus are out. “Even Microsoft eventually felt the same need and Office 2007's "ribbon" interface was the result.” (Bob Flora, Carolina Road Software)
In “compact layout” you're not more than one click away from everything you want to do. That is if you've activated 'clickless operations', meaning that when you hover over a button, the options pop up and await your command (if necessary in a nifty tool bar).
There's also a 'classic layout', and a 'minimal layout', with all the nice menus I am so used to. With just a tiny little bit of very easy editing (“settings.ini”), you can chose another 'minimal layout'.
There is a wealth of options. All the formatting you want: fonts, paragraphs, page, header and footer, there's an outline function, indenting, outdenting, the format brush to easily transfer formatting, and only one feature I miss: format styles.
Some solutions are as simple as clever, e.g. when you mark a word and click the 'Encyclopedia' button, Jarte looks that word up in the Wikipedia. Correspondingly 'Dictionary' and 'Thesaurus' take you online, unless of course, you installed WordWeb, a free thesaurus that fits in seamlessly.
"Word is a great word processor and may always be the tool of choice for large projects that require elaborate formatting, but for many tasks Word's size and complexity can it feel like you're driving a tank to the grocery store.” (Bob Flora, Carolina Road Software)
Nevertheless Jarte indulges with templates, tables, you can insert pictures and documents, manage files and folders without ever leaving Jarte. There's the 'Recents' menu and there's 'Favorites', which you define yourself to easily access your documents. Jarte remembers your clipboard, let's you take screen shots, offers statistics on the number of pages, lines, words and characters, lot's of ways to customize the software.
There's one feature I haven't seen yet in any other word processor. We almost take it for granted in our web browsers, file managers or even plain text editors but it's still missing in Word or OpenOffice: tabs. Jarte gives you those tabs. Well done.
If collaboration is your concern, don't be concerned. Jarte reads Rich Text Files (rtf) Word documents (doc) and even Word 2007 (docx). You can print all that, but even more intriguing and laudable is that you can export your document as a PDF-file. This feature depends on utilities like PDFCreator which you can downoad from here.
You can install it on an USB-stick and take it with you, have it on stand-by, minimize it to your system tray, it takes less than 10 MB RAM, and it is there, when you need it. The price is priceless, and if you feel like supporting the crew, buy a license but be aware because “rather than attempting coerce users into purchasing Jarte Plus by leaving some important features out of Jarte, the idea is to make Jarte very capable and then add only "would be nice" type features to Jarte Plus. In that sense, Jarte Plus' extra features are a reward for people who enjoy using Jarte regularly and wish to support the project.” (Bob Flora, Carolina Road Software) To put it differently: Jarte Plus, the commercial version, adds some extra features but Jarte Free is really sufficient for most.
If you're looking for something smooth, fast and fully equipped for your daily word smith activities; Jarte.
I like it!
Jarte
Website: http://www.jarte.com/
Download link: http://www.jarte.com/download.html
Author: Carolina Road Software
Current version: 3.2
Version date:
Download File size: 2.58 MB
License: freeware
Operating systems supported: Windows 98, ME, NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Vista
Additional Software Recommended: PDFCreator, WordWeb
64 Bit version available: This 32-bit program works perfectly on Vista 64-bit
Portable version available: Yes
Non-English languages supported: yes
PDFCreator
download: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/
WordWeb
download: http://wordweb.info/free/
Best Free Word Processor - Jarte a New Face in Town!
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This isn't really a roundup, just a pitch...Abiword should be added if it is meant to be a list.
I hope jarte could have some open office document plug ins or compatibility so that I could change my or open my odf document with jarte.
Mohan
I have recently found the use of Zoho's online word processor to be well suited for small organizations that need to share documents and have access on the go. It has much more functionality than Google Docs. You can also use Google Gears to access the documents offline and sync them later. The free version give you the use of 5 applications. I also like the MS Office & Firefox plug-ins. Would be nice to have a plug-in for OpenOffice.org.
AbiWord is a good alternative to Jarte.
I like AbiWord
Me too :)
--
always look on the bright sight of life...
I downloaded the free 3.2 version and have been playing with it on a couple of laptops. Strange as it seems, it really sings with Vista. In Vista there is an embedded mini-Outlook, calendar, email and contact manager that all work together, not the old Address and Express programs that had no connections other than e-mail address lookup. Add the Gnumeric for Windows and what you have is just about the whole ball wax missing only a presentation system. I've not looked for one yet.
The Jarte uses not resources, and on closing there are no residual hidden files such as with OOo and Office chewing up resources and that's where it benefits Vista as it is a resource hog to begin with.
I just bought the pro version of 3.3 and besides the laptop mounted the USB version on a micro-card and it works. I'll mount it on my MP3/USB device though I do not use it as a flash drive. There is a menu item to do this in the app so not quite sure what the 2nd download .zip file is unless it is to by-pass mounting it on a computer first.
As it converts Office 2007 files, something OOo does not yet do, just having it as a file converting is a plus. Sadly it does not open and save in odf. However, as it works with the Office 2007 files and OOXLM (or whatever it is called) just got the blessing as an open file format, Jarte may be ahead of the curve to all others.
As a WP, the program has almost all features you need and want for all but the most complex stuff and it does it all easy, fast, with no need to keep hiting F1 to figure out how to do things. It does not have mailmerge and of course does not interface with many of the programs that are tied to Word but for many, it is not too much oof an issue, if at all.
Conclusion: This is a must have program, if for no other reason as an upgrade to Wordpad but also as an alternative to those bloated wordprocessing programs.
Nice piece of software. I love the tabs thats why my favourite office suite is Symphony, but it looks as if this is going to be used more. Providing I don't have any spreadsheets to works from.
Thanks for that CY, excellent images as well, clear and precise.
Tony
Thanks for the info CY.
Peter: I'll probably try this for writing contracts that need to be sent as PDFs. The current solutions I use all result in bad formatting screw-ups in the PDF. I need to find something that outputs decent PDFs (and please don't mention any Adobe app). Word doesn't cut it either.
chris.p
A review:
Laura Blackwell (PC World) januar 2008
Fits onto a small, 64MB USB drive, works on several files and formats, it's free. Not as good as the paid-for version.
The trade-off for Jarte's small footprint and shallow learning curve is a dearth of features. A paid-for version, Jarte Plus, offers more, such as automatic spelling correction, automatic outlines, the ability to save clipboard cuttings for future use.
This clever little word-processing program lets you open, modify, and save files in common formats. And we do mean "little": Jarte fits onto a small, 64MB USB drive with room to spare for a couple of documents, making it perfect for travellers. Whether we ran Jarte off an XP system's hard drive or a portable USB drive, it opened Microsoft Word .doc, Rich Text Format and Word 2007 .docx files without a hitch. (The .docx functionality requires Microsoft's free, but large, compatibility..
Talk is cheap, but Word is expensive. Fortunately, Jarte is free.
Don't know about that. The point about Jarte is it's minimalist design. I certainly do not share the views expressed in this article http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html, but I structure my writing in phases
I hate to be distracted by spell checkers. I prefer
after I've completed my writing
Of course, I could also write a list of features available in Word Processors on Planet Earth, (automatic outline would be great!) but I feel it is the same discussion as we find it in respect to a FireFox with a zillion extensions and a browser like K-Meleon with none.
What I enjoy most about Jarte is it's speed, it's size, it's understatement. If I want to write a large document, my MO will be completely different and I'll probably use Open Office Writer guided "by intelligence and experience" (Nero Wolfe)
I really like it. Apparently, you can add custom dictionaries, which is fairly critical for some of us:
http://www.jarte.com/help_new/spell_check_dictionaries.html#supplemental...
If only I could think of something to use it for ....
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