Jarte Editor's Review

Jarte is a word processor developed using the Microsoft WordPad word processing engine. The program is completely free, no ads or other strings attached. However, there is a commercial version to which you can upgrade to in order to take advantage of more features and options.

The first thing that surprised me when I first ran the program was the tabbed interface. I opened multiple documents, each in its own tab, just like in a web browser. Another browser-like feature is the 'Session saving'. This means that you can can close the program having multiple open tabs and the program will restore them when you run it again.

This small application has pretty much all the features needed to make a very good word processor: font and paragraph customization, auto saving feature, spell checker, dictionary and thesaurus, the possibility of inserting pictures, special characters, objects, symbols, equations and so on.

The interface has an exquisite design and is quite easy to get used to it. A neat feature is the 'no click' way to use the program. This means that you don't need to click a tool or option. Hovering the mouse over the selected feature will open or activate/deactivate the selected options.

The program comes with American, British and Canadian English spell check dictionaries, as well as with Dutch, French, German and Spanish spell check dictionaries. The dictionaries and thesaurus are integrated with WorldWeb online dictionary resource.

Pluses: The program is compact and small enough to be installed and run from a USB Flash drive. It can handle plain text, rich text, Word and Word 2007 (DOCX) documents. Files can be exported to HTML and PDF file format.

Drawbacks / flaws:

In conclusion: In all, 'Jarte' is a working alternative to Microsoft Word. You should give it a try.

version reviewed: 4.1