Jarte: A lightweight, fast, feature-rich and free word processor

Anyone looking for a fast, feature-rich and easy to use word processing application, you may want to check out my latest find, Jarte.

As someone who writes for a living, I spend more than an average amount of time with a word processor of some sort open and ready. Given that, I have tried what I would also consider more than my fair share of word processing applications. Of course, that leads me here to this post where I am able to share a recent discovery.

The application is called Jarte and at first glance it appears to be just about as basic as could be, except once you make a few changes it suddenly becomes much more user friendly. I should also point out that Jarte is based on the Microsoft WordPad word processing engine, however it adds much more in terms of features.

Moving on, Jarte is a free download and will run on Windows XP, Vista and 7. Another nice perk here is Jarte offers a fast start up time, and the application is very small at just 2.84MB in size. Two of which are perks for anyone who may be using a low powered computer, such as in my case with a netbook. Additionally, you can also run Jarte as a portable app from a USB flash drive. Strangely though, despite being a Windows only application it does look kind of Mac-like, which depending on your point of view may be a good or bad thing.

In terms of features, the official feature list is quite long, which is a little surprising for a free application. Anyway, to keep this post from turning into a huge feature list, let’s just say that Jarte has most of what you would expect from any full-featured word processing application. However, if I could pick just one extra that stood out for me, it would be the tabbed interface. For me this is a nice perk due to the fact that I am often working on multiple articles and may need to jot a quick note while working on something else. Additionally, it has a built-in spell checker, dictionary and thesaurus, as well as many options for formatting fonts and paragraphs. It also has multi-level undo and redo, which has helped me numerous times when I get a little happy with the delete key.

In terms of supported file types, Jarte can open, edit and save RTF, DOC and DOCX files.

Additionally, there is also a Plus version available for $21.87 CAN, and it does offer some nice extra features such as AutoCorrect and background spell checking but personally I can check my spelling after I have finished writing.

Now, while I am really enjoying using Jarte, I will say that I would not consider it a replacement for a full office suite such as Microsoft Office, OpenOffice or, to a lesser degree, Google Docs. That said though, it does offer more than a simple alternative such as Notepad.

Filed Under: Software > Tech Trends
Tags: jarta, processing, processor, Windows, word