In praise of Jarte

You've never heard of Jarte?  Neither had I, until this morning.  It's an excellent (and free!) word processor for Windows, very small and compact, built on Microsoft's Wordpad kernel.   It's garnered very good reviews from PC World, Gizmo, and users.

I came across it while looking for a text editor that would strip out all word processor formatting codes, including hidden ones, from the manuscripts for my first two novels.  Miss D. and I have decided to format them for publication using Scrivener, a program that Marko enthusiastically recommends (and which he used to format his recently-published first novel).  We've been playing with an evaluation copy for some time, and like it.  Unfortunately, Microsoft Word, OpenOffice and many other word processors insert all sorts of extraneous code into one's documents.  You can't see it with the naked eye, but it's there, and it can screw up formatting in other software - including Scrivener - like you wouldn't believe!

I did an online search for text editors that would reduce a document to plain text alone, stripping out all formatting and other hidden codes, prior to importing it into Scrivener.  Jarte came highly recommended from several sources, and it's free, so I downloaded a copy and tried it out.  I was amazed!  It's very small, compact and fast, and it does an excellent job.  It stripped out all the extraneous codes from my manuscript in no time, and has given me a clean plaintext copy, ready for formatting in Scrivener.  I like it so much I think I may use it instead of OpenOffice for routine documents.  (There's also a paid version with additional features, but I don't think I'm going to need them.  However, if you don't have a full-featured word processor already loaded on your computer, it's cheap enough that you may find it worthwhile to invest in the paid version.)

I highly recommend Jarte as a very useful program.  Go download it for yourself, and play with it.  I think you'll like what you see.

Peter