The Rich Text Format is a proprietary document file format with published specification developed by Microsoft Corporation from 1987 until 2008 for cross-platform document interchange with Microsoft products. Prior to 2008, Microsoft published updated specifications for RTF with major revisions of Microsoft Word and Office versions.
TextEdit is an open-source word processor and text editor, first featured in NeXT's NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP. It is now distributed with macOS since Apple Inc.'s acquisition of NeXT, and available as a GNUstep application for other Unix-like operating systems such as Linux. It is powered by Apple Advanced Typography.
Scribus is free and open-source desktop publishing (DTP) software available for most desktop operating systems. It is designed for layout, typesetting, and preparation of files for professional-quality image-setting equipment. Scribus can also create animated and interactive PDF presentations and forms. Example uses include writing newspapers, brochures, newsletters, posters, and books.
A document file format is a text or binary file format for storing documents on a storage media, especially for use by computers. There currently exist a multitude of incompatible document file formats.
Spotlight is a system-wide desktop search feature of Apple's macOS and iOS operating systems. Spotlight is a selection-based search system, which creates an index of all items and files on the system. It is designed to allow the user to quickly locate a wide variety of items on the computer, including documents, pictures, music, applications, and System Settings. In addition, specific words in documents and in web pages in a web browser's history or bookmarks can be searched. It also allows the user to narrow down searches with creation dates, modification dates, sizes, types and other attributes. Spotlight also offers quick access to definitions from the built-in New Oxford American Dictionary and to calculator functionality. There are also command-line tools to perform functions such as Spotlight searches.
Desktop search tools search within a user's own computer files as opposed to searching the Internet. These tools are designed to find information on the user's PC, including web browser history, e-mail archives, text documents, sound files, images, and video. A variety of desktop search programs are now available; see this list for examples. Most desktop search programs are standalone applications. Desktop search products are software alternatives to the search software included in the operating system, helping users sift through desktop files, emails, attachments, and more.
Beagle is a search system for Linux and other Unix-like systems, enabling the user to search documents, chat logs, email and contact lists. It is not actively developed.
TextMaker is a word processor, which aims at utmost compatibility with Microsoft Word, its default document format is .docx.
The following tables compare general and technical information for a number of office suites:
This is an overview of software support for the OpenDocument format, an open document file format for saving and exchanging editable office documents.
An IFilter is a plugin that allows Microsoft's search engines to index various file formats so that they become searchable. Without an appropriate IFilter, contents of a file cannot be parsed and indexed by the search engine.
Xapian is a free and open-source probabilistic information retrieval library, released under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It is a full-text search engine library for programmers.
Bean is a word processor for Mac OS X. Originally free and open source software Bean became closed source at version 3. However, the Bean executable is still distributed free of charge. According to its author, James Hoover, Bean is not meant to replace Microsoft Word, but to be a lean word processor that is beautiful and user friendly. Many of Bean's operations are carried out by the underlying Cocoa framework of Mac OS X. The name Bean is a play on Cocoa and Java, two popular programming frameworks.
DocFetcher is a free and open source desktop search application. It runs on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux and is written in Java. The application has a graphical user interface, which is written using the Standard Widget Toolkits.
OpenSearchServer is an open-source application server allowing development of index-based applications such as search engines. Available since April 2009 on SourceForge for download, OpenSearchServer was developed under the GPL v3 license and offers a series of full text lexical analyzers. It can be installed on different platforms.
FBReader is an e-book reader for Linux, Microsoft Windows, Android, and other platforms.
