I’ve been playing around with a word processor called Jarte. It isn’t specifically intended for use by writers as such (as far as I know), but it does have some features which many writers will find useful.
Tabbed documents
Many word processors allow you to have more than one document open at the same time, so you can flick between them. However, their presence is usually not obvious, and you have to resort to keyboard shortcuts or foraging around in order to find them again.
The way that Jarte solves this problem is by having the documents available in the form of tabs across the top of the screen. All you have to do to bring a particular document to the fore is click on its tab.
Thus you may, for example, be writing a short story while referring to some notes you made in a separate document. Jarte enables you to switch from one to the other quickly and easily.
The tabbed document view is very useful indeed
Another feature I like is the option to remember your last session when starting Jarte. I was able to take advantage of this feature and automatically open four documents at once, and have the cursor placed at the point I reached in the last document I edited.
If, like me, you illustrate your work with screenshots, there is a built-in facility for this. There is also a “clip manager”, for screenshots and copy/paste, but it seems to save only the most recent screenshot between sessions. To save copied text, and as many clips as you like, the best way appears to be to create a document specially for the purpose.
The built-in screen capture tool is handy, though the clip manager is not wonderful.
Finally, there is a built-in reference bar which allows you to look up words in a dictionary, thesaurus and Wikipedia. The first two reference sources mentioned re on the web, rather than built in, so you will need to have an internet connection in order to use them.
I like the fact that there is a Reference Bar at your fingertips. The 'Plus' version of Jarte apparently allows you to configure this yourself rather than having to accept the built-in options
There are several other features I could mention, but I shall leave you to explore it for yourself. It saves documents in rich text format (RTF), so you can open them in other word processors if you wish.
Jarte is free, but there is a “Plus” version with extra features.
Jarte is a viable alternative to more commercial word processors, although it does lack the handy features of Word, as looked at in the “13 things you didn’t know about Word” series.
Download Jarte.
