Jarte is a compact, portable and free word processor with a surprising number of features.
Your first reaction to the program, though, will probably be mild confusion at the odd interface. The toolbar features tiny icons, but clicking these actually call up Jarte's menus, which regularly ignore Windows conventions. (Although fortunately you can tweak the program to restore a more easy-to-understand view - read Welcome.rtf in the Jarte folder for more.)
Once you've mastered the interface basics, however, you'll begin to appreciate Jarte's extensive feature list.
The program can open plain text, RTF, DOC and DOCX files, for instance (and several at once, thanks to its tabs).
Documents can include tables, pictures, hyperlinks, equations or objects.
There's a full range of paragraph formatting options, and a format brush to help apply them quickly.
And there's template support. A clipboard manager to help you display and reuse 25 clipboard clips. A configurable "auto save" option. A handy screen capture tool. A simple spell checker; the option to integrate a dictionary and thesaurus; easy header and footer configuration tools, and the list goes on.
Not bad at all for a portable tool, less than 10MB in size, which you can run from a USB stick.
Please note, if you like Jarte than it might be worth considering Jarte Plus, the program's commercial big brother. This adds features like auto correct, automatic outlining, the ability to attach notes to a document, more customisation options, and a word count in the status bar, amongst other things. It can be yours for $19.95, and you can find out more on the Jarte site.
Version 5.3 (History):
- Inserting web links prefixed with protocols other than "http" and "https" did not work properly.
- Words containing a curly style apostrophe were marked as spelling errors uness the Enable Smart Quotes feature was enabled.
- Performing a "Save As" on a new, empty, plain text document caused Jarte to crash.
- The Enable Page Counting and Enable Word Counting settings are accessed by right clicking the status bar. These settings now appear the Tools > Options menu when Jarte is in screen reader mode in order to provide better accessibility.
- If Jarte ran as a portable app on a USB drive, and a custom path was set for WordWeb, a font manager, or Jarte's backup folder on that same drive, then Jarte did not take into account the custom path's drive letter might change when the drive switches computers.
- The page number boxes were disabled when the Print dialog's "Print pages" setting was selected, making that setting impossible to use.
- The "Replacement word or phrase" box remained disabled when the "Automatically replace" option was selected in the spelling dialog used to manually add new words to a spelling dictionary, making that option impossible to use via that dialog.
- There was an unusal scenario where use of the Clip List hot key could cause Jarte to crash.
- There were still cases of Jarte's Clip List feature causing Jarte to crash when a clipboard copy was performed in Microsoft's Excel program.
- Right clicking on a hyperlink and selecting Open Hyperlink caused the resulting web page to be opened twice on older versions of Windows.
- When the text cursor was moved after changing the case of a text selection, the modified text continued to appear highlighted until the next text modification was made.