I use several text editing and word processing apps on my iPad, but my writing tools of choice for composing and editing with the tablet are usually from the family of text processors from German developer Infovole.

What’s a text processor? It’s a writing app that’s more than a basic text editor, with more tools and features, but doesn’t support full word processor abilities like text formatting, styles, footnotes, and page layout. For the vast majority of my text crunching needs, Textkraft hits the sweet spot.

iPad

Textkraft normally sells for a reasonable $3.99 on the App Store, but before infovole begins a huge spring update marathon, iPad users now have the opportunity to buy Textkraft at a 75% or more discount during the Easter holidays.

Beginning Sunday, March 24th (Palm Sunday) the Textkraft app family will go on sale for 0.99$ / Euro 0.69. Also, all in-app purchases of Easy Writer and Word-2-Text go on sale for only 0.99$ / Euro 0.69. iPad and iPhone users can save up to 84 percent off the regular price.

Customers who buy now will be able to get the big summer update for free.

Textkraft features an extended keyboard with 36 special characters and symbols that are missing on the iPad. The bracket button places quotation marks, brackets and other combinations around a sentence or text selection. Two of my personal favorite additional Textkraft keys are a capitalization toggle key and a Forward Delete key. Cursor keys are better than on a real, freestanding keyboard with eight keys and 10 functions. Quick selection-markers for word, sentence and paragraph make for much less finger-movement hassle, and there’s a handy Undo/Redo and history function for testing various phrasings.

Textkraft’s search dialog supports regular search, find and replace, and you can specify case sensitive and entire word-only search parameters. You can open up to five documents at the same time and cycle through them instantly using a small button array at the bottom of the screen.

iPad

Textkraft is completely without in-app purchases. Features include an extensive dictionary with synonyms and possible follow-ups. The font menu features a point size slider and three line-spacing buttons. Ten different fonts are supported: American Typewriter, Arial, Baskerville, Bradley Hand, Cochin, Courier, Helvetica, Palatino, Times New Roman, and Verdana.

iPad

A unique print dialog on the iPad includes a WYSIWYG preview that allows you to customize font size, number of pages and print options before printing. There is also a useful palette for profing tools. Texts can be saved and shared as PDF or plain text files.

iPad

There are also six color theme choices; normal (black on white), Sepia (my personal fave), “Night” (white on black), “Retro” (green DOS-style text on black), “Mint” (dark green on light green), and “Glamour” (two shades of magenta).

Easy Writer Lite shares most of Textkraft’s extended keyboard features, is not language bound, and offers simple and comfortable writing on the iPad for purists. There is also a free Easy Writer Lite version, and it even has a pretty deep feature set. Dropbox synchronization, however, requires an in-app $0.99 upgrade, so if you need Dropbox (and who doesn’t?) you might as well get the standard Easy Writer.

The app Word-2-Text converts Word documents into plain text files which can be directly opened in apps that don’t support the import of .doc and .docx files.

TextKraft is available in English, French, and German and requires iPads running iOS 4.3 or later to work

Infovole puts its main focus on the development of iPad apps, localization and creative app marketing solutions. For more information, visit the Infovole website.

* This article originally appeared on AppleTell

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