A classic word processor, written from scratch in C on GTK 4, Pango and Cairo: a menu bar, two toolbars, a ruler, a status bar and a page.
A working word processor: typing, formatting, styles and numbered headings, headers and footers, footnotes and endnotes, tables, pictures, lists, columns, page borders, find and replace, spelling, a thesaurus, hyphenation, mail merge, macros in a dialect of VBA, a Document Map, Compare Documents, a split window, Normal, Online Layout and Page Layout views and print preview — reading and writing RTF, OpenDocument .odt, Word .docx and .doc, WordPerfect .wpd, AbiWord .abw, HTML, PDF and plain text, and writing EPUB e-books and LaTeX. A PDF opens, is edited and is saved back as a PDF, with the document kept inside it; PDFs can have a password to open and one to modify, be signed with a certificate, and be compressed down to their pictures' resolution. A LaTeX mode typesets PDFs with LaTeX, in the Latin Modern of scientific papers and theses, with mathematics typed as LaTeX writes it and a preview beside the page that follows the typing. File ▸ Versions keeps a document's versions in Git, document by document. Word 97 is the yardstick: its menus are the specification and docs/PARITY.md keeps the score against it. docs/STATUS.md lists what it does, Word42.md what it does not do yet, docs/COMPARISON.md sets it beside Word, AbiWord and LibreOffice Writer on size, speed, files and features, and the user guide describes every command in the program.
Word42 speaks the language of the desktop it runs on. With English, its menus, dialogs and messages come in the ten most spoken languages in the world: Chinese (Simplified), Hindi, Spanish, Arabic, French, Bengali, Portuguese, Russian and Urdu, and for Arabic and Urdu the window is laid out from the right. The user guide is in English.
Word42 is made to write books in. AutoCorrect sets quotation marks and
dialogue dashes the way the text's language does — « » and – in
Norwegian — and the spelling, thesaurus and hyphenation follow the
document's language; the status bar counts the words toward a goal, the
Document Map weighs the chapters against each other, and a Novel
template, typewriter scrolling, backup copies, EPUB export and
word42 --convert-to=pdf|epub|odt FILE do the rest.
docs/morild is Morild, a 150-page science-fiction novel
in Norwegian written in Word42, as its manuscript, a PDF and an e-book.
Every push to main builds a Windows bundle and installer (artifacts of
the Windows workflow)
and an unsigned Word42.app for macOS (the macOS workflow's
word42-macos-app; first launch is a right-click ▸ Open). Linux builds
from source; a Flatpak manifest is in build-aux/.
Word42 needs a C11 compiler, Meson, Ninja, and GTK 4.10 or newer with Pango, Cairo and gdk-pixbuf, plus Lexbor for HTML. Reading PDF and the LaTeX preview need poppler-glib, passwords on PDFs and signing them GnuTLS, File ▸ Versions libgit2, spelling Enchant, hyphenation libhyphen and the thesaurus a MyThes file; without any of them Word42 still builds and says which is missing. Per-platform dependency lists are in docs/BUILD.md.
meson setup builddir
meson compile -C builddir
./builddir/src/word42The document is a piece table — the design several word processors have used since the 1980s — with formatting interned in an attribute table, symmetric undo records, structural marks for paragraphs and sections, and pagination in twips at a fixed reference resolution, so a page breaks in the same place at every zoom and on every screen. docs/ARCHITECTURE.md tells the whole story.
GPL-3.0-or-later. See LICENSE.
Word42 is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or derived from any Microsoft product or from AbiWord; both are named only as the yardsticks Word42 measures itself against and for the file formats it reads and writes. It contains no code, artwork, fonts or text from either; its icons, logo and stylesheet are its own work.