Jarte is a word processor based on Microsoft WordPad’s engine, which makes it extremely light and portable. The tool has been designed to be simpler than other text processors as well as to take better advantage of WordPad’s hidden features. It supports opening documents with the extensions DOC, RTF, and TXT, and in the case of DOCX, it requires an additional compatibility pack.
The program has a multi-tab interface that allows editing various documents at the same time. It lets you switch between three layouts. In this regard, there is the default layout, named Compact, which shows just some of the options. Moreover, you can also change to the Minimal one, looking quite similar to WordPad. Finally, the Classic layout has bigger buttons and a side panel where the commands appear. I regret saying, though, that I am not a fan of any of the available layouts. In my opinion, they look somewhat outdated.
It seems logical that Jarte supports doing everything you can do with WordPad. However, it does allow other operations, like taking screen captures as well as inserting equations, links, pictures, and objects. It also lets you highlight text in 32 different colors, which is not possible with other editors. As to proofreading features, it includes a spellchecker and several dictionaries. Luckily, there is also a screen reader, which may come in handy for users with visual impairments.
In short, Jarte can be the right substitute for your operating system’s built-in text processor. Fortunately, there is nothing to lose, as it is both light and free. Yet, if you really like the product and would like to access more features, you can buy Jarte Plus, an advanced edition that is sold quite inexpensively.
v5.4.100.1 [Feb 16, 2016]
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.
Other smaller fixes and enhancements.
