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 6.2 (History):
 

Enhancements:
Jarte now supports plain text templates in addition to rich text templates.
The tabs "Sort" command sorted open tabs in strict alphabetical order. Tabs are now sorted in natural order similar to how Windows sorts file names.
Bug Fixes:
Jarte's automatic check for updates option stopped working when the Jarte website was moved to a new server in 2017. The automatic update check now works properly in Jarte 6.2 but unfortunately it will continue to fail in older versions.
The "Close and Delete" feature used to close the the currently open file before prompting to see if see if the user really wanted to send the file to the Recycle Bin. If multiple files were open then this could be a little confusing because the newly active file being shown by Jarte was not the one being deleted. Jarte now waits for the user to respond to the prompt before closing and deleting a file.
Occasionally Ctrl+click of a hyperlink would fail to properly open the linked page in a web browser. The problem only affected users who made use of advanced setting Web Browser Params.
File hyperlinks created with Jarte do not normally work in other word processors because the links are designed in a special way to make them portable. New advanced setting Use Portable File Links
As of version 6.0, the Ctrl+Backspace shortcut key activated new command "Go to Last Edit". Unfortunately, that shortcut key was already in use as a means of backspacing a word at a time, which was then inaccessible. So, the shortcut key for "Go to Last Edit" has now been changed to Shift+Ctrl+Backspace.
Quick Bar buttons assigned Show/Hide type commands did not always behave as expected.
Using the "Attached Note" shortcut key while Jarte's main menu was displayed caused the File Options submenu to appear before the Attached Note disalog.
Jarte would not create a new document from a template if the template file itself was already open.
The JarteRunCommand script helper function did not work properly for a handful of commands.
When the Format Brush was used to apply a heading style to a line it would appear to work except the line was not internally converted to a true heading. This would mean that programs such as screen readers would recognize the line as a header.
The file type filter in the Open and Save file dialogs did not behave as expected when its value was changed.