TextMaker Viewer

[BigD]

I haven't had much time to look at this free program in detail, but RegShot and RegScanner showed no unexpected registry changes. TextMaker Viewer from http://www.officeviewers.com/ allows you to open, view and print all common word processing formats - useful for Word .doc and especially OpenDocument .odt documents which are becoming more common.

I installed it to an arbitrary folder by applying Universal Extractor to the downloaded setup executable, then deleted all the language files I didn't need. The 9MB TMViewer.exe can be shrunk down to about 2MB by applying UPX.

Hope someone finds this useful.

[dot]

Thanks a lot for mentioning this. Applied everything as told by you and works like a charm. And thanks for mentioning that trick with UPX! Always happy to learn something new! For me, this is a keeper, as I don't have M$ Office installed, probably will never install it, and also don't want to install the M$ Word Viewer, which is, OF COURSE, bigger than TMViewer and, OF COURSE, doesn't support the free document formats.

RegShot registered quite a few changes, though (I executed TMViewer and opened one document, which I shouldn't probably have done):

Keys deleted:3
Keys added:3
Values deleted:8
Values added:17
Values modified:38
Files [attributes?] modified:5
Total changes:74

But UndoReg, evaluating RegShot's output, only lists 3 registry values for undoing.

Maybe someone else can check the relevancy of the changes and how TMViewer behaves with regard to portability. I mean, if its just about 3 registry entries this tool could be considered portable.

[Andrew Lee]

This is a really great app. It even supports Unicode quite nicely!

Unfortunately, it writes settings to C:\Documents and Settings\UserName\My Documents\SoftMaker. I can't find any way to make it read/write settings to the application (EXE) folder.

[dot]

Hmm... took me some time now to find that entry, Softmaker, you mentioned. Found it in the "My Documents" folder, that I use on a different partition (moved there probably with TweakUI). Got so many partitions here with all kinds of folders distributed across them, sometimes it's hard to find stuff.

[Kea]

As I couldn't extract the new version 2008 with Universal Extractor, I tried another method.

1. I started the setup and waited for all files to be extracted.
2. When the new setup window appeared (asking where to install), I opened Windows Explorer and in C:\Documents and Settings\my_user_name\...\Temp\ i opened the folder 7zSC.tmp.
3. I copied all files from that folder to a new folder on my memory stick.
4. Then I went back to the installer and cancelled the installation. Now the temp folder was deleted.
5. In the new folder on my memory stick I deleted all the the language files (*.hyn and *.dwr) I don't need, leaving only the files for English and Swedish.
6. Finally i deleted some other files (lizenz.dat, index_de.htm, liesmich.txt, tmv4.reg and tmview_de.tmd).

Then I started TextMaker Viewer. It works perfect and I can't find any entries from TMV in Documents and settings or unexpected entries in the registry.

[joby_toss]

This is a very good program.

It creates at launch

Code: Select all

x:\Documents and Settings\user\My Documents\SoftMaker\Settings\tmvconfig.ini

It adds "[SoftMaker]" line to "%system%\win.ini".
No relevant registry entries.

[webfork]

Old thread update: this program is no longer maintained by the SoftMaker folks (the website link just points to freeoffice.com) but you can still download the 2010 version from Softpedia.