People have gotten so used to Microsoft Word and Notepad, with their built-in printing and processing functionalities, they often don't realize there's a myriad of excellent alternatives. Alternatives that often outperform the popular commercial products in their class. Jarte's user interface, for example, implements the next GEN Polska-based approach towards spell GUIs. What about OpenOffice, a full-blown office suite worthy of your attention. Even Microsoft Publisher has found a serious contender in Page Plus SE.
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HomepageOpenOffice is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose.
OpenOffice is the result of over twenty years' software engineering. Designed from the start as a single piece of software, it has a consistency other products cannot match. A completely open development process means that anyone can report bugs, request new features, or enhance the software.
The Bullzip PDF Printer works as a Microsoft Windows printer and allows you to write PDF documents from virtually any Microsoft Windows application.
- Print to PDF from almost any Windows program.
- Supports 64-bit operating systems.
- Direct output to the same file each time or prompt for destination.
- Control if the printer should ask if you want to see the resulting PDF document.
- Control output and prompts programmatically.
- Password protect PDF documents (128/40 bit encryption).
- Quality settings (screen, printer, ebook, prepress).
- Watermark text, size, rotation, and transparency.
- Superimpose/background documents.
- Appending/prepending documents.
- Command line interface to all settings.
- COM/ActiveX interface for programmatic control.
- Multiple output types supported: BMP, JPEG, PCX, PDF, PNG, and TIFF.
Jarte is a free word processor that is compatible with Microsoft Word and can read and save files in Word format. It can also do rich text, PDF or HTML. The first thing that struck me about Jarte was the interface. The interface looks very slick but is very easy to use and customizable in several ways. You can switch back and forth between minimum, compact, and classic views by the click of a button.
Jarte does some stuff in an original way. The screen capture, for example, allows you to select any area on your desktop to capture and paste into Jarte. Or the fact you can just save your documents to PDF, no questions asked. One of my main big gripes about programs like Word (other than the price) is that I can't easily find features that I need to use. Jarte solves this by placing some buttons across the top that show the stuff you need just by hovering over them. Very nice.
WordWeb is a one-click English thesaurus and dictionary for Windows that can look up words in almost any program. It works off-line, but can also look up words in web references such as the Wikipedia encyclopedia. The software has a full dictionary and thesaurus for American, British, Canadian, Australian, Indian, and global English.
Features include:
- Definitions and synonyms, including related words
- 150 000 root words
- 120 000 synonym sets
- 5000 audio pronunciations
- Look up words in almost any program
Mobysaurus is a free, feature-rich English thesaurus and dictionary software that integrates Moby Thesaurus II, Roget's Thesaurus, GCIDE Dictionary and WordNet. All royalty-free, powerful and most suitable for everyday reference.
Features include:
- Offline Database
- Fully Searchable with support for wildcard and incremental search
- Unique root words suggestion
- Automatic Highlighting
- Bookmark & History function
- Unlimited Copy/Export
- Handy Online References
Pageplus SE is a free layout program that can help you produce your own printed materials. You get a range of templates, which quickly can be turned into business cards, brochures, posters, banners, invitations, menu cards etc. You can also choose to make your own template and use it. With the commercial market leaders, QuarkXpress and Indesign, asking many hundreds of dollars, PagePlus offers a viable free alternative. A great program for a small business corporation or the home enthusiast.
EditPad Lite is a general-purpose text editor, designed to be small and compact, yet offer all the functionality you expect from a basic text editor.
You can open as many files in EditPad at a time as you want and change between the open files by clicking on their tabs. It has unlimited undo/redo and you can even undo changes after saving files. Its block functions allow you to save parts of your text to disk and insert a file in the current text. EditPad puts an icon in the system tray that remains visible, even if EditPad is closed. This way you have easy and fast access to EditPad, without the need to keep it running all the time. If you don't like this behavior, you can, of course, disable this feature and make EditPad behave like a normal Windows application.
EditPad fully supports double byte character systems (DBCS) so you can edit texts written in Far East languages, such as Chinese, Japanese or Korean, as easily as those written in European languages. Many settings such as word wrap, line numbering and auto indent can be made for each file type individually. You could activate word wrap but not auto indent when editing a plain text file, and just the other way around when editing source code. You can also define your own file types which will be used to build the filters for open and save dialog boxes.