Word42

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, find and replace, spelling, hyphenation, mail merge, a split window, a page-layout view and print preview — reading and writing RTF, OpenDocument .odt, Word .docx and .doc, AbiWord .abw, HTML, PDF and plain text. docs/STATUS.md lists what it does, Word42.md what it does not do yet, and the user guide describes every command in the program.

Getting it

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/.

Building

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 needs poppler-glib; without it Word42 still builds, writes PDF, and simply cannot open one. Per-platform dependency lists are in docs/BUILD.md.

meson setup builddir
meson compile -C builddir
./builddir/src/word42

How it works

The 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.

Build status

Licence

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.