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Gwennel: A seriously amazing 140KB word processor

Gwennel is the latest kid in town to join the family of miniature word processors and oh boy, is he small. Clocking at under 140KB and with just the right set of features, Gwennel takes the crown for the smallest and lightest word processor around.

Gwennel opens in a zap. I haven’t seen a program, much less a word processor, open that fast other than Notepad. The program has a WYSIWYG editor and natively supports the Open Document Format. But you can also open and save documents in the DOC format.

gwennel

One of Gwennel’s best feature is Styles. The program employs the LaTeX approach of document creation and editing. The program’s editor apart from allowing classical rich text editing (bold, italic, text color, etc) also permits to put these properties in styles and to apply them to the text content. The goal of styles is to keep presentation and content separate from one another.

Just like you define styles of an entire website using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), you can define styles of the document's heading, paragraph, title etc using Styles. The advantage of Styles is that you can quickly change appearance of a particular aspect of the entire document by editing the Style only once. 

gwennel-styles

According to the developer, Gwennel is not intended to be used as a word processor. But I say, it’s a damn fine word processor. Sure it’s missing advanced features found in traditional word processors like pages, header, footer or a spell checker, but that’s because the developer has a different set of goals set. Once he starts looking at his creation as a word processing capable tool instead of an over qualified note taking application, the missing features can be easily implemented.

Gwennel is free, portable and available for Windows only.

Other light weight word processors that you should definitely take a look: FocusWriter, Darkroom, Writespace, Lyx.

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Comments

  1. AnonymousAugust 6, 2010 at 5:12 PM

    Hi,
    Too bad it does not recognize the Doc!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Kaushik PatowaryAugust 7, 2010 at 9:44 AM

    Gwennel can create and open the DOC format. Perhaps the document you are trying to open contains feature exclusive to MS Office and hence it didn't open.

    ReplyDelete

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